Google Autoflip Can Help You Crop Videos To Fit Any Aspect Ratios

Google recently introduced Autoflip, an open-source tool to fix bad cropping. What the tool does is to reframe the video to make it fits alternate aspect ratios.

In the blog post about the tool, the AI team of Google said that content for desktop and TVs usually has the ratios of 4:3 or 16:9. However, as smartphones are quickly becoming the most common method to consume content, these ratios might make it seems odd to users.

This issue is often fixed by video curators who address salient contents in each of the frames, identify their transition, and change the crop regions. This is a time-consuming and labor-intensive method.

Autoflip is designed to address this issue by keeping the camera aiming at what is really important. The tool is built on the Mediapipe framework and it uses machine learning-enabled object tracking and detection to understand the content of the videos.

Autoflip can automatically adjust between different scenes and then analyze each of them to determine which it should use, tracking mode or static frame, according to Google.

The technique sounds pretty neat and it has the edge over static video cropping. However, for now, Autoflip is better used on Snapchat or TikTok videos than TV shows or movies, which requires the entire shot to be taken into consideration.

Those who are interested in the technical aspects of the tool can go to Google’s blog post for more details. The source code of this project can also be found on Github, with instructions for those who want to give it a try.

>>> Google's New Free Software Lets You Create Your Own Security Key To Protect Your Account