Wouldn’t it be nice if you could simply take your videos, photos and music and tell an application to turn those into a nice video presentation? With Windows Story Remix, that’s what Microsoft is trying to attempt. This new application, which will launch with the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update later this year, combines all of the new features in this upcoming version of Windows 10 into a simple to use, machine learning-based application that automatically creates professional-looking videos for you.
A product like this always looks great in on-stage demos, of course, but if the final result is anything like what the company showed today, then it’s definitely worth a closer look.
After you give the application the videos and photos you want it to work with — and maybe a soundtrack, too — it sets off to build the video. In doing that, it looks for scenes with a lot of action or where people smile, for example. If there are multiple people in those videos, you can even decide who should be the “star” of the final cut. And if multiple people take videos of the same event from multiple angles, Story Remix will try to integrate all of those into a cohesive video. All images and videos are automatically tagged, of course, so you can easily search for people or objects. All of that is powered by Microsoft’s AI capabilities.
In the demo, those videos look great, but in some ways, the fact that Microsoft has seemingly made it very easy to edit and customize these machine-built videos may just be the application’s biggest asset. If you want to change the font of your titles or make a clip a little bit longer, that’s easy to do. But that’s nothing special. Every other video app does that, too, and even Google Photos does some of this with its automatically created videos.
What makes Story Remix stand out is that it allows you to write on a video with your Surface Pen, then anchor that text to a person or object, and as the video pans, that text will stay right in place. You can even go a step further and do this with any 3D object you find on Remix 3D, which is tightly integrated with Story Remix. Say you want to turn a soccer ball into a fireball. You simply find a nice fireball in the Remix 3D library (and that fireball could even be part of a more complex Remix scene), anchor it to the ball, and you’re done. You can also anchor objects to the ground.
Using modern web technologies, users will be able to easily share their montages across the web.
Story Remix will launch with the Windows 10 Fall Creators update, which we expect to hit a computer near you around September.
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