Visual effects company GenArts is introducing a new app that it hopes will leverage some of the same technology used by movie and TV production studios to improve mobile videos and make them actually watchable, and hence, shareable. The app, called Vivoom, has yet to be released, but will be positioned to compete against existing mobile-social video apps like Viddy and Socialcam and Magisto and Montaj and all the others.
At the core of Vivoom’s video-editing platform are a wide range of video filters, which it believes will inspire users to share some of the unshared content shot and trapped on their mobile devices. Unlike other mobile video editing platforms, Vivoom has tons of these filters. Dozens. Hundreds, even. Close to a thousand premium looks in total.
With so much choice in how you make your videos look good, one of the challenges users face is making sure they have the look that’s best for the video they’re creating. And so, one of Vivoom’s key differentiators is a recommendation engine for choosing filters, which is based on an analysis of the user’s video, profile, social data, and previous preference data. Unlike other social video tools, Vivoom’s filters aren’t just overlaid on top of the video. Leveraging GenArts’ visual effects background, the app actually changes pixels within the video to match what’s happening in the footage.
According to Vivoom CEO Katherine Hays, the average user has 20 to 40 videos that they’ve shot with their mobile phones but haven’t shared with anyone. Usually, those videos aren’t shared because they’re boring not visually appealing. Vivoom hopes to change that through the addition of “premium looks,” or filters.
Vivoom’s editing platform is actually cloud-based, so it will have Web and mobile editing apps available soon. Since it’s based in the cloud, the videos render faster and use up less processing power than if they depended on the device’s CPU. And being based in the cloud also allows for near-instantaneous previews of the videos being created.
The cloud-based architecture will also make it available to third parties for use with their own video-publishing suites. Hays told me that the company will have at least one third-party launch party leveraging the Vivoom technology and make it available to end users in the next few weeks.
The Vivoom platform was incubated within GenArts, but has an exlusive license to the visual-effects engine and related technology. We’ll wait to see how it compares once it’s released, but it’s already got a ton of competition. Still, consumer mobile video editing is a tough nut to crack. Maybe what the segment needs is a professional video-editing company to show everyone how it’s done.