Instagram has started to roll-out a substantial update to its Boomerang app, which brings a bevy of new editing options.
Following on from the unparalleled success of the Instagram filters – like What Disney Character Are You, Your 2020 Predictions, and The Six Second Blink Challenge – the Facebook-owned social network has decided to spice-up its spin-off app, Boomerang. After launching the standalone app back in October 2015, Instagram later built in the functionality directly into the main app.
That left little reason to have the standalone app… unless for some reason you wanted to leverage the effect – which records a brief video clip and plays it from start to finish, then reverses the footage to create a bouncing effect – without signing up for the hugely-successful social network. With the latest update, there is definitely a reason to re-download the app to your handset.
Instagram has added the ability to trim the video clip. Arguably something that shouldn’t been there from the start, until now, Instagram users have had to ask their friends to jump back into the pool, cheers their Prosecco, or dance in front of a neon sign with an inspirational quote in a bougie brunch venue all over again if they missed the right moment in the footage. The ability to cut-down a longer video, or start it a little later, should mean that you’re always able to salvage a workable Boomerang.
Elsewhere, Instagram has three special effects for Boomerang – Slow Motion, Echo and Duo. While the first is pretty self-explanatory (it plays the clip at half speed), the others are not as obvious. Echo adds a motion blur effect trailing behind the action and Duo gives your pristine 4K video footage a glitchy effect, similar to when your VHS player would start “tracking” after you hit play.
As reported by TechCrunch, these effects are exactly brand spanking-new. SnapChat (which has a huge marketshare of younger users – the same audience turning their backs on Facebook and a number of other platforms owned by Mark Zuckerberg’s social networking empire) has had some suspiciously similar effects in its arsenal since 2015. And new-kind-on-the-block TikTok, which allows users to share short videos – like Vine (Rest In Peace) – also shares a number of these filters, too.
However, with the huge success of Instagram Stories, many users will likely swarm to the effects in this new update, thanks to the tight integration with Stories. It’s also nice to see Facebook lavishing some attention on the standalone Boomerang app after all these years too. If these prove popular, expect to see more in this vein in the coming months.
Instagram Boomerang is available right now on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.