Free App Magically Turns Your iPhone Pics Into Videos

 

Takes, a new app making its debut at SXSW is attempting to reinvent how you take photos. The iPhone camera app takes photos as you traditionally might with your smartphone camera, but then goes a step further to turn those pictures into unique, shareable videos clips, complete with a soundtrack.
“It’s as easy as taking photo, and you get a cool video,” Amit Man, founder of Takes, told Mashable.
He says the original idea for the app came to him while watching a Harry Potter film.
“In Harry Potter they have these things where the photos in the newspapers start to move, and I thought ‘Oh, this could be really cool if I could make every photo come alive,’” he said.
On the surface, Takes looks like a traditional camera app, with a huge camera icon on the bottom of the screen that works as a shutter button for snapping photos. When you take a photo using Takes, however, not only are you saving the image to your camera roll, you’re also recording a short video clip associated with that photo. The length of that clip is based in part on how important Takes thinks the photo is.
“We monitor the sensors of the iPhone, and the movement of the iPhone,” says Man. “If you take a very fast shot, it’s going to be a short clip, but if you’re going to take a picture and you’re really careful composition-wise, it’s going to be a longer clip. The idea is that we’re trying to get the perfect video segment for that photo.”
Man says he thinks they've come up with the perfect algorithm for determining exactly what length of video you want for a particular shot, so you don’t end up with video clips that are too long or too short.
“The main data is the motion of the iPhone. So, we record the long video, but we also record the meta data of the capture -– where the iPhone is pointing, the acceleration, the motion of the iPhone -– and then when you click to take a photo, we take the timestamp, put it on the data, and say ‘What is the best video segment for this video, for this timestamp’ and then we associate the photo with this miniclip,” he says.

Photos are all tagged by when they were taken and placed in a special Camera Roll for Takes. When you’re ready, you can select any number of your photos you’d like -– photos from a specific time-period can be selected in bulk –- and then have the app turn those photos into a video clip.
You can select music from the app's library to add to your final creation, and the app has several filters to give it an Instagram-like feel.
Takes can be saved to the Camera Roll on your phone, sent to friends via email, or shared on Facebook and Twitter.
Ultimately, the app hopes to replace the camera on everyone’s smartphone — regardless of platform — making Takes the new standard for photography. If you ask Man how they’re doing, he’ll tell you the app is well on its way.
"Why use a regular camera when you can use Takes?" he says. “It’s almost as good as Harry Potter magic photos.”
Check out, below, a Take I created this weekend on a walk though the Mission in San Francisco. You can create your own Take now by downloading the app from the App Store.