We are all now videoing huge amounts of material on our mobiles and other devices, but the ‘best bits’ – like your friend successfully doing an olly on a skateboard – rarely see the light of day because they are buried in 10 minutes or more of otherwise dull footage.
Few people have the time – or even the skill – to trawl through and edit those good bits down into a real sequence. So with one click Magisto finds the good edited highlights automatically.
This is effectively Animoto for the lazy or unskilled. Hooray for us.
Via powerful visual recognition of the images in a video Magisto detects interesting behavior – like a prat fall etc – and understands the context of the video. It mines the metadata from the pixels and uses it to select the best parts, stabilises the best parts, de-noises them and creates a fairly polished product, with the effects and transitions between the highlights.
It runs in realtime so by the time you have uploaded it it is ready with the finished video to be embedded on a web page.
Thus a video of 10 minutes can be compressed into 1 minutes of more interesting highlights, set to music you choose or upload. There’s an upload limit of to 600MB of video.
This is a freemium business model but the seven person startup ot of Tel Aviv (launched today at Techonomy3) is looking at other options like subscription. The founders – lead by Oren Biman (CEO), Dr. Alex Rav-Acha and Roy Klieger (Product) are experts in video, having come out of one of the legendary elite Israeli army intelligence units, which seems to produce so many startups from this country. One recently left Boxee.
Magisto is currently in closed Alpha with a few hundred users testing the service and more invitations sent out every day. A smartphone app is planned.
Funding is from Magma Venture Partners, a Series A, in May last year, terms undisclosed.
Here’s a link where the first 100 users from TechCrunch can get an invitation to the private Alpha.
I can confidently predict Magisto is going to do well.