Real Networks (remember RealMedia? It’s still big in China) has announced a new app, RealTimes, that adds a touch of class to your photo and video sharing with intelligently constructed video montages. RealTimes comes in free and pay versions and utilizes online storage to back up/sync your media and its creations across devices. Android, iOS, and Windows (but not Windows Phone) are all supported.
In essence, RealTimes (a superset of RealPlayer), combs through and then combines your photos and video into 30-second, 45-second, or longer montage movies with soundtracks. RealTimes detects things such as blurriness and duplicates to eliminate bum images from the mix; parses image metadata to determine dates and locations; and even detects the focal point (subject-wise) of your videos. Other tricks are utilized, so read the upcoming review. You can, of course, select media yourself.
RealTimes running on a Windows PC.
All processing is done on board the device and it’s quick, though you must wait for content to sync if you want use it on other devices. In my brief hands-on, I managed to create a reasonably cool video of my 1996 cross-country trip, which because the photos were scanned in 2011, was originally dated by RealTimes as such. No, technology isn’t perfect. Upload to social media services such as Facebook is also supported.
RealTimes is free for 2GB of storage (7GB if you enable auto-upload) and 30-second videos, but you can remove the length restriction and get 25GB of storage for $5 a month, or unlimited storage to the tune of $10 a month or $100 yearly.