Magisto: Is Personal Video Poised To Take Off?
Despite the best efforts of the top camera and smartphone manufacturers, personal video hasn’t exploded the way still photos have. However, like still photos, many say that personal video has the potential to break out from its role as “memory clips” and become an even more integral part of consumers’ real-time social sharing habits on Facebook and other social networks.
How many of you remember the camcorder? Yea, those now ten year old standard definition camcorders were really something. Remember dealing with the tapes? The ingest process, where you had to bring in the data by playing it back in real time? Taking fifteen hours to import fifteen hours of tape? Magical times they were not. With camcorders, creating a polished movie worth sharing took much more time, effort, and skill than enhancing and sharing photos. Even using programs such as iMove and other easy to use editors, it still was more work and required more artistic craft skill than most consumers had. And let’s face facts here, most consumers lack the training or the artistry or both required to mix shooting video with high production values, professional level editing, music, and dialogue to create a compelling movie narrative. This imbalance has to date restricted video to capturing a few special occasions.
As camera manufacturers reported consistent declines in DSLR sales, the so called “mirrorless” cameras increased in numbers produced, but not nearly as fast as the video cameras in smartphones. Nowadays, video cameras are in practically every mobile phone. Short-form video apps like Vine, Cinemagraph Pro, and Instagram are familiarizing consumers with the concept of taking video anytime and anywhere with the camera always with them while new tools like Animoto and Magisto offer longer, story-driven personal video options. [If you haven’t already tried Magisto, you need to. You can find it HERE. ] According to studies done by Magisto, for the widespread adoption of personal video to ever match that of photo sharing, there are a few things that need to happen :
- In terms of video capture, short-form video taken on smartphones is booming. The line between video and photos is blurring: Consumers can take photos and videos at the same time, and extract high-resolution photos from video footage post-recording. For actual usage to blur, the industry must educate customers that they can capture photos and video simultaneously, rather than having to choose between the two media types.
- Video enhancement solutions have made huge strides recently. Video editing no longer requires a substantial learning curve. Some apps or websites let consumers create an edited and professional looking multimedia video literally within minutes. Going forward, these automatic video enhancement solutions must be better integrated with action cam footage and viral sharing — they’re starting to get good at photo and music integration already.
- Video sharing on the smartphone is starting to trend toward “here-and-now sharing,” with the consumer recording and enhancing the video on the same device. That would accelerate if users get more selective sharing options — beyond mass-posting on YouTube and Facebook, they’ll want to post to specific groups of friends and family, and ad hoc contacts based on vicinity, address book, calendar, and social network data.
Driven by artificial intelligence and simple user experience, Magisto is an ecosystem for creating and sharing professional quality personal movies. It automatically selects the most compelling moments and, like an expert video editor, weaves them together to convey a story with customized styles and music. Videos can be curated in video albums and shared via Social Media, eMail and SMS. Magisto can be used across iOS, Android, and the Web.
The app has a 4.5 star rating in the Apple Store and Google Play, and has been downloaded by millions of consumers and is a top video application in a dozen countries.
Magisto is funded by Horizons Ventures and Magma Venture Partners. The company is headquartered in Tel Aviv, Israel, with offices in New York and California. To learn more, visit http://www.magisto.com.
Editors Note: We made this movie simply using the free version of Magisto. We have requested access to the Premium version so we can do a full review, so stay tuned for more!
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