Movie Stiller Review

iPhone App - Designed for the iPhone, compatible with the iPad

Movie Stiller is an odd little app that does nothing other than make your already shot videos smoother. It doesn’t take videos from within the app or anything like that; it just works its magic in post editing.

To test out the app, I decided to shoot a little one minute clip of my dog. She was on the bed at the time, so I figured that she would be still enough to make the shoot easy. Then I put the app through the ringer, walking 180 degrees around the dog, moving in and out to change the focus, and then switching from vertical to horizontal to see if the app could handle the stress.

My results came out as a mixed bag. On one hand, the app completely eliminated all of my normal camera handshakes (except for the violent intentional ones), but on the other it had a hard time keeping what I was filming in one place. I’ll take a few steps back to explain.

Once I turned the app on and selected my one minute clip, the app spent a good minute or two fixing it up for me to watch. Once the movie was processed, I watched it with a little blue box overlay. To eliminate the shakes, the app zooms in a bit to get rid of the small portion of the border that would otherwise be moving. The blue box comes into play as your re-sizer, just in case the shakes were really bad and the app had to cut a ton off.

The real problem with the app was that any and all walking movement resulted in motion craziness and black bars moving in from all sides of the video. The resulting video looks more like an art film with crazy motion rather than a smooth video that I would normally try to shoot. It turned out looking really cool, but it wasn’t really the effect that I was expecting.

To really get your money’s worth with Movie Stiller, you have to make an attempt to be still yourself. What I’ve learned from using this app, as well as some Mac programs that do similar things, is that there is no cure for The Blair Witch Project. The crazy shakes will be crazy no matter what, but an easy to use app like Movie Stiller will definitely make your minimal movement home videos a bid more tripod-worthy.