
Again, maybe there's a lot of movement as you focus on many different things, but Cliplets can help you zoom in. Or there's that holiday movie you took, in Rome. Pass it through Cliplets, though, and you may be able to create something where the background is entirely still, the guests all motionless, and all you have is your daughter blowing out a candle, then smiling at the camera. Imagine a video of your daughter's fifth birthday, for instance: shaky camera work, lots of movement, it's all a little messy. Impressive? Not so much.Microsoft's Research Cliplets is an interesting tool which enables you to extract one precious moment from a video, and focus specifically on that, producing something that's not quite a still, not really a video, but something in between. While the results can look kinda cool if you use the right video clip (and spend the time to figure out how to use the software), there really isn't any "wow factor" to them - you'll get a 10 second loop of animated objects in front of a static background. Adjusting a mask selection is tedious, so make sure you get it right the first time. You will need to spent some time watching the videos to understand even the basic usage and invest a lot more effort to create an advanced cliplet with multiple layers and some additional effects. To take full advantage of the possibilities it's probably best to shoot a short video specifically for this purpose.Ĭliplets does not come with a Help file, however there are several video tutorial provided and an online forum for additional help. While this sound great and is in fact an interesting concept, it requires you to have just the right movie clip for it, the animated and static objects cannot overlap at any time during the selected frames. From this example, you can easily create a cliplet that shows the fountain with running water in front of a frozen crowd - you basically create a mini-movie that is a combination of still image and moving video. The Microsoft example clip demonstrates this by using a video clip of a water fountain in front of a moving crowd.
In a nutshell, the program allows you to separate an animated object from a 10 second video clip and overlay it onto a still background from the same clip. Cliplets is a new app from Microsoft Research that demonstrates the concept of juxtaposing still and dynamic imagery.
