A new app from the former head of video-sharing app Vine hopes to repeat the success of the cult social network by making it easier to shoot and edit short clips.
Trash hopes that its secret weapon will be “computational cinematography”: the app, which entered closed beta on Monday, uses machine learning “to automate the un-fun parts of video editing”, automatically processing video to cut together short clips with a consistent mood and feel.
A similar approach, computational photography, has already radically changed smartphone photography, enabling features such as the Pixel’s Night Sight and iPhone’s Portrait Mode.
Trash’s co-founder, Hannah Donovan, who was Vine’s last general manager before the service was shut down by its owner, Twitter, said she hoped the approach would lower the barrier of entry to video editing.
“We’re analysing the video for a bunch of different things,” Donovan said. “Some are obvious computer vision concepts like ‘does this video have a face?’ Others are from our ontology of cinematographic concepts – for example, ‘is this a close-up shot?’ Based on what the computer ‘sees’ in the video we synthesise it into a rough cut and sync it to music for you to play with and change.”
An early employee at Last.fm and co-founder of music-based social network This Is My Jam, Donovan said there was still room for niche social networks.
“The goal of the platform right now is to show/inspire people around what they can make. While it’s true that we might be feeling like we’ve reached our limit on social media and content consumption, to believe that people are done with creative expression would be to give up on humanity. People are always going to make things and share to express themselves, it’s just a question of how.”
After it launched in 2013, Vine soon attracted an enthusiastic following. The app, which allowed users to shoot and post six-second videos, became the most downloaded on the iOS App Store within months, and created a host of social media celebrities, including Logan and Jake Paul, Nash Grier and Brittany Furlan.
But the service lost those stars to Twitter and Instagram as they struggled to monetise their newfound fame, and was shut down by Twitter in 2016 when the company moved to bring the remainder of its celebrities on to the main network.
Vine’s co-founder, Dom Hofmann, attempted to launch a successor app, called V2, in mid-2018, but the launch was delayed due to funding difficulties. In April this year, the app, renamed Byte, began beta testing.
