More and more, people are shooting videos on their phones. But once the video is done, what do they do with it? For most users, those videos sit there, unused and unshared, on the mobile device. A few startups have emerged to help users create more entertaining videos and share them with friends. The latest in this batch is Lumify, which has built an iPhone app that creates awesome 20-second videos that can be quickly and easily uploaded to Facebook.
The Lumify iPhone app, which is available on the App Store today, provides one of the easiest ways to automatically edit videos together. All users have to do is pick a few pieces of video from their Camera Rolls, choose to “Lumify” those videos, and pick a soundtrack to run in the background. The app then stitches together a montage of that video goodness.
Lumify uses proprietary algorithms to determine and insert interesting moments of video clips together and sets them to music. The app works by analyzing and editing high-quality, 1080p videos on the fly — which is pretty unprecedented when compared to other mobile apps. Its output is a 20-second video that can be saved to the camera roll or uploaded to Facebook. Here’s one example:
Lumify was founded by Kuan Yong and Monica Miller, who met at San Francisco-based incubator AngelPad. Yong was previously a product manager at Google and YouTube, while Miller worked at UBS/Hedge Fund.
The two face some stiff competition from other startups looking to automate the video editing process. There’s Magisto, Animoto, and others who have similar products for automatically creating more enticing videos shot on mobile phones. No doubt more will pop up, especially as users realize that their phones have cameras, and that mobile videos don’t have to be boring.