A new YouTube tool has the ability to turn any camera into a high-speed camera. In a blog post titled, “Slomo makes everything better,” the video sharing site debuted a feature that allows users to turn slow down the speed of a video without negatively affecting the video quality.
YouTube showed off the new tool by applying it to a four second video of a man walking down the street in Times Square. The result is as impressive as advertised. While the video does get slightly warped, the frame rate retains similar quality to the unedited video, as does the sound.
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Creators can access the slow motion tool through YouTube’s enhancement suite or via the YouTube Editor. A few people have already applied slow-mo to their own videos, such as this jet landing footage.
The tool is YouTube’s way of catering to the increasing popularity of slow-motion videos on the Internet. The Slow-Mo Guys have accumulated more than 2 million subscribers thanks to the channel’s consistently fascinating high-speed camera footage (Fun fact: One-half of The Slow-Mo Guys is Rooster Teeth‘s Gavin Free, who has served as a slow motion cinematographer for several major motion pictures.) Jumping off of that series’ success, other online video platforms have distributed slow motion programs of their own, with Yahoo’s Kaboom and Revision3’s Distort serving as two notable examples.
By debuting the new tool, YouTube is hoping for the real life application of what I once jokingly referred to as ‘Gavin’s Law‘: As speed approaches zero, views approach infinity.
