Samsung Snarks iPhone with Live Focus Ad

Apple recently launched their new iPhone range, the iPhone 11, 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max. The new Pro and Pro Max versions are aimed at photographers and filmmakers. With 4 x 12MP sensors and a new FiLMiC Pro version allowing iPhone video to be shot with 2 of the phone’s inbuilt cameras simultaneously.

So samsung decided to take a shot across their bows, with a new ad showing 2 smartphone users trying to shoot a selfie video. The ad is a 15-second video and begins with the tagline “Bokeh up the mood with the Galaxy Note10.” CUT TO: an iPhone user and a Note 10 user shooting a video.

“Missing a little….je ne sais quoi?” says the title over the iPhone. Meanwhile the Note 10 user drags a slider to create a live Bokeh effect for the video. These days, Bokeh = shallow depth of field.

Since AI-created-Bokeh has appeared in many smartphone camera software, many people have asked “Why don’t they do this for video?!” Now Samsung have, only for their Galaxy Note 10. But if you look at Samsung’s own video demonstration, you will see why it hasn’t quite taken off yet.

Samsung’s Live Focus for Video

The camera software has to try to recognise the intended object to focus on. It then has to draw a mask around the object, in real time. The area outside the mask gets blurred.

Now, for photos – especially selfies with only one head and shoulders figure – this works pretty well. But as soon as you introduce more than one person, the AI can struggle to draw that mask correctly. And doing this in real time for video is an even harder task.

If you look at the video above, you will see the mask (and blurred areas) jumping around, losing the edge of the object(s). Focus on the left shoulder of the guy on the right, as he bobs up and down.

This might be fine as a fun feature for consumers. But anyone serious about their video would probably reject this feature. Having said that, I’m always open to the creative use of these new features. Who can say it might not look cool if used deliberately.

An example would be those shaky hand-drawn animations, where the final result is a kind of wobbly, scribble look. Once upon a time, that would have been considered terrible animation. Then some animators decided it looked more human and friendly, so they started doing it on purpose. These days, it’s a recognised style of animation, used by thousands of animators.

Anyway, that aside, it’s not considered “pro” enough for Apple, at the moment, Especially since they started giving their phones the “pro” tag. But I’m sure camera software will keep improving and one day live focus will appear on iPhones, perfectly masking around objects in real time.

But it’s not just about the Bokeh

One thing that seems to have been forgotten in the rush to create Bokeh for video – it’s not just about blurry backgrounds. For portrait photos yes. But for video one of the main reasons to have a shallow depth of field is so you can do nice focus pulls.

Focus pulls are one of the most common and useful tools for a filmmaker to direct the audience’s attention from one object to the next. But this Live Focus will never be able to achieve this, no matter how accurately it can draw the mask. Well, perhaps one day smartphone cameras will be able to process an image in 3D so that it can allow focus pulls to be created in post. But that’s a long way off.

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