One of the big areas of Android 4.4
but also an element that is coming really as part of Google+ to all handsets
is the new photos tool.
Now this tool is absolutely fantastic.
It allows you to interact with all of your images and videos
very easily so you can now use it to browse through
all of your photos and videos. You can then set certain photos and videos that you want to upload into Google's cloud
and have them AutoAwesomed, including the new
video tool, which I'm going to show you. So the way this works
is you simply go into videos
you select the videos that you would like to AutoAwesome. I'll just find a couple I've
got in here from my holiday collection
Let's just take a couple of these. Now just be careful when you do this because if you tap on the little expander
down at the bottom here it will send the video full screen and you have to page back you just want to kind of
tap on the centre.
Hit select and what the system will now do
is analyzes all of those videos and
it starts to cut them together with music and transitions and everything else
to make them awesome.
You can see there just three very short videos
and it's rapidly cut them together for me. Now what it does it does like a
very small resolution render
and what you then do is you can then add a title call this
test and then you can
oops, let's just go into here, so you've got different music as well that you
can drop on and also then just save and
off it will then go. And it will then show you how much of each one it's taken
to make use of. You can add some more photos if you'd like. And then click save.
And then you can select the quality.
We'll send that up at 1080p. At that point the video footage it's sent over to Google I believe it does all
of the rendering and processing there based on
the settings that you've selected. This is very much all about the cloud,
your device isn't really doing very much other than this initial little bit of
processing that may help with Google.
Now this is quite interesting.
Instead of using a traditional kind of slider that
says 10% complete and what have you, it has this circle that spins round and
as the circle grows it's done more and more rendering.
It's really nice and it's great to kind of get away from the usual kind of
tick-tick-tick-tick-tick percentage bar. If you're
uploading a lot of videos or if you're uploading quite big videos
initially what will happen is it will show you a percentage indicator
just saying, you know, that 20% of this video has been rendered but when you're dealing with just a few small ones
then it's very quick and easy. It's just a wonderful wonderful feature.
When you combine that with kind of how the new photo app is working which we
believe is going to replace the gallery soon enough
if it hasn't already in fact, it really is a fantastic departure from the
previous rather crummy app
in my opinion. You can see it's backing up one photo, it's actually backing up a video at the moment and Google probably just need to
tidy that up a little bit so that
it's a bit more obvious what it's doing. It's backing up a video right now and not
a photo but anyway, little bugs for you but
all of your images and everything all in there as highlights going back in
in chronological order, or you can go through and select them. You can put
pictures and videos all into these AutoAwesome videos and
it will handle them quite nicely. It really is a wonderful little
extra that's coming to Android and obviously to Google+ as well.
I would expect to see it on IOS as well at some point.