Movie Stiller Review
Posted 02/17/2011 at 11:00am
| by Steve Paris
Holding a camera steady while recording is hard enough, but the lighter it is, the more the slightest shake of your hand will show up in your clip. iMovie on your Mac does a great job at smoothing out any jerkiness, but iMovie on your iPhone has no such feature...until someone made an app for that.

Step one: Analyzing your footage takes a few seconds.
The idea is simple: analyze a clip and figure out how much to rotate it and zoom into it at any one time to make the motion as smooth as possible. Once that's done, you use a slider to zoom in on your footage. The more zoomed in, the less you’ll see black bands around the edges, the unavoidable consequence of the cropping and rotating needed to smooth the footage.

Step two: Once analyzed, you can increase or decrease the effect with a slider.
Sadly, the results are far from satisfying. Whether the clip is smoothed out or not becomes irrelevant since the image appears to have turned to jelly: Everything wobbles in the most unnatural way rendering the clip useless -- unless you’re looking for a weird wobbly effect, that is.

Step three: If you’re happy with the results, export it back to your Camera Roll as a new clip.
The bottom line. Until developer Creaceed can come up with algorithms that don’t add wobbles to everything you see, it’s best to avoid this one.
Requirements
iPhone or iPod touch running iOS 4.2 or later
Positives
Easy to use. Experiment with the effect with a slider. Doesn’t affect your original clip.
Negatives
Prone to crashing. The results are very unsatisfying.