Instagram has a new app out today. It’s called Hyperlapse and promises to help iPhone owners shoot smooth, professional-grade video clips. You can speed them up and make time-lapse footage, or chose a slower pace to see Instagram’s special image stabilization algorithms in action. To keep things steady, Hyperlapse relies on your iPhone’s gyroscope rather than searching for traditional scene references like angles and high contrast tracking points. Having to compute all that information would murder your battery, and turning to the hardware’s existing sensors is a clever way of avoiding the hassle. Best of all, everything’s done through an incredibly simple user interface. There are no accounts to set up or sign into. Not an Instagram user? It doesn’t even matter.
Playback speed — which can be set at 1x, 2x, 4x, 6x, 8x, 10x, or 12x — determines how much faster your original video will be played. If you record a 30-second video and select the default 6x speed, for example, the resulting video will be five seconds long.
When choosing a playback speed, you should take into account the length of your original video and how you plan on sharing it. Generally speaking, the longer the original video, the higher you’ll want the playback speed to be.
When you’ve finished recording and selected a speed, tapping the green checkmark saves the video to your camera roll. Once saved, you can also share the video to Facebook or Instagram. Unlike Instagram and the recently-updated Vine, you can’t import videos you have already recorded into Hyperlapse. You can, however, record videos and save them to edit and share later.