YouTube Stories will soon let you create chroma effects

Snapchat kicked off by creating the ephemeral stories, short video clips in which the user could give free rein to their creativity, embellishing them with animated clips, stickers and text. Next, any self-respecting social network needed to have among its options that of creating their own stories. First it was Instagram, then WhatsApp with its controversial statuses, later Facebook Messenger… If you didn't have Stories, your social network wouldn't work. So clear.

A virtual green screen thanks to Artificial Intelligence

YouTube could not be less and in November of last year it kicked off its own Stories that increased and improved the characteristics of those already seen, for example, on Instagram. The only downside to YouTube Stories is that, in order to get them, the user had to have more than 10,000 subscribers. Now, these Stories will be improved, and a lot, thanks to the new chroma effects.

The tool that will create the chroma effects without the need for a green screen is called 'Video Segmentation' At the moment, it is in Beta version for only a privileged few in mobile version. If you open your YouTube account and can create this type of Stories, congratulations, you have been chosen for it.

It is complicated to separate the background from the foreground in the front camera of a mobile, unless you have a camera that detects the depth of the scene (as the iPhone X does).Doing it with an image could still be easy but with video clips it is even more difficult. That is why engineers at Google and YouTube created a neural network, training it with images similar to the ones shown below.

A chroma adapted to mobile cameras

In this way, said neural network learned to recognize the physical characteristics that make a head or shoulders common, in addition to a series of of key optimizations that decreased the amount of data they needed to perform the process. The model in the photo in question was then used to compare it with the next model in the next photograph. Thus, the neural network could learn stepwise until it was sufficiently precise.

The result has been excellent: they've been able to create a fast and accurate targeting engine that runs faster than 40 frames per second on a Google Pixel 2 and over 100 on an iPhone X.This new function in Youtube Stories, without a doubt, supposes an injection of creativity in the different creators of YouTube, although they have to wait a bit to be able to use them.

YouTube Reel, for now, for users with 10,000 subscribers

This is what YouTube calls its Stories feature: YouTube Reel. The YouTube user with more than 10,000 subscribers can have access to that reel where they can post ephemeral video clips... or not. This is one of the great advantages of YouTube Stories, along with being able to edit the videos, choosing an excerpt and uploading it later. Some features that Instagram users have been asking for for a long time but, for now, are the privilege of a few.

There is no news of a possible democratization of YouTube Stories. At the moment, the only thing we can do is try to reach the necessary subscribers. So, you know, get to work!