Instagram's New Feature Will Blow Your Mind

Welcome to the future. On Tuesday, Instagram rolled out Hyperlapse, which makes it easy to create gorgeous time-lapse videos — before, only possible with fancy equipment — at the click of a button. Basically, Hyperlapse smooths out your video and cuts the camera's shaking for a clean, amplified, movie-esque feel.

Yeah, a generation of film majors are groaning, but the app is pretty amazing. Before its rollout Tuesday, Wired reported that Hyperlapse uses a motion algorithm that smooths out otherwise-shaky video and gives it an otherworldly, floating look. This kind of image stabilization previously came with a hefty price tag and nice (as in, nice) equipment. Now you can do it from your iPhone (no Android yet, but they're working on it!).

The app's design is intuitive, using Apple's round video button to start recording. The timer at the bottom of the screen will tell you how much footage you have, and you tap the same button to finish recording. From there, you can adjust the speed anywhere from 1X to 12X. The resulting video is a smooth, quick-fire lapse done in seconds. Eat your heart out, Godfrey Reggio.

You obviously don't want sound for a superspeed video, so there is no sound on Hyperlapse. There are none of the famous filters on the app, but it does make it really simple to send it over to the Instagram app and fuss over the exact shade of "I'm still not tan" you want to be.

Even for my perpetually shaky hands, the video smoothed out perfectly. Plus, it was extremely simple to get from Hyperlapse to Instagram.

This is only Instagram's second app (besides, obviously, Insta itself). And, as happened with Instagram's first product, I'm sure there'll be grumbling about how simplistic it is to make bad camerawork look good — but it'll be exciting to see what can be done with the app. Obviously there will be a time limit to how much it will upload to Instagram, but since you can save it to your camera roll, there could very well be a new cadre of iPhone directors coming soon. Again, film students are collectively groaning at me. I can feel it.

Now if only I had something more interesting to do a timelapse on than the fall from day to night as I sit in front of the television. WOMP.

Images: Instagram