Latest video improvements

As you might be aware, Control has an awesome feature to record a video of your selected part of the track. In this update, we wanted to highlight what kind of improvements we have made to the video creation during last fall/this spring – especially on iOS.

TL;DR: Video creation is faster and videos look better!

Speed

Let’s start with – what we think as – the best improvement: Speed. Video creation is much faster now on iOS/Mac than what it used to be. We identified one part of the video creation pipeline taking much more time than expected. After some tuning, what used to take ~60 seconds takes now ~8 seconds! Part of this improvement is just taking more advantage of the multiple cores of your device’s chip and part is just optimizing the creation of the video frames.

Smoothness

Another improvement is that your videos just look much better now! Why? Because of two reasons::

  1. Video frame rate is now 60fps. In Android it has been the case always but in iOS it used to be 30fps. This was a compromise earlier so that the creation would take less time. But with the aforementioned performance improvement, it was possible to up the frame rate also on iOS, while still making the creation faster.
  2. Transition between locations is now handled in a smoother way. This improvement was made to both Android and iOS. Previously, in the case when you had a track with GPS points very close to each other in time but further apart in distance the end result would be a bit jumpy/glitchy video. Now we make sure that point movement is as smooth as possible.

video-share-frame

Handles

For Android users this is old news but in iOS you can now drag both the start and end points separately for easier selection with drag handles.

Also, it used to be the case that the video had a maximum length of 30 minutes but removed also that restriction with this change. You can create a video of the whole course if you like to do so!

Best of all: video creation is a free feature for all users.

Still, we’d like to remind you that subscribing to Total Control will help us with the development and you will get lots of cool features: Replay, What If, direct imports from Garmin, Suunto and Polar and more! We are continuously updating the app and the subscription package. Expect more features to appear this year.

Have a fun orienteering season 2023 and remember to post those videos online!