First-Person Hyper-lapse Videos

It's striking but it's far more believable when you realize that they need to play at a much faster speed than the source, so they have tons of extra samples from which to extract information. They basically use all that data in the extra frames (that would otherwise simply get tossed away in a regular time-lapse) to construct a 3D scene. This wouldn't look nearly as good if they had to play it at normal speed.

>I would guess that I could upload a shaky video to youtube to get it smoothed out, download it, and speed it up with similar to their rate and get similar results.

No you certainly wouldn't. Watch the technical video at the bottom of the page. It will explain why this is not trivial to do and why standard stabilisation technologies aren't useful to smooth out time lapses.

If you'd looked at the site, the authors actually do the exact comparison you suggest: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/hype... It's better than a raw timelapse, but not (IMHO) nearly as good as their results.

From the paper intro:

    Video stabilization algorithms could conceivably help create smoother
    hyper-lapse videos. Although there has been significant recent
    progress in video stabilization techniques (see Section 2),they do not
    perform well on casually captured hyper-lapse videos. The dramatically
    increased camera shake makes it difficult to track the motion between
    successive frames. Also, since all methods operate on a
    single-frame-in-single-frame-out basis, they would require dramatic
    amounts of cropping. Applying the video stabilization before
    decimating frames also does not work because the methods use
    relatively short time windows, so the amount of smoothing is
    insufficient to achieve smooth hyper-lapse results.

And later on (section 7.1):

    As mentioned in our introduction, we also experimented with
    traditional video stabilization techniques, applying the stabilization
    both before and after the naive time-lapse frame decimation step. We
    tried several available algorithms, including the Warp Stabilizer in
    Adobe After Effects, Deshaker 1, and the Bundled Camera Paths method
    [Liu et al. 2013]. We found that they all produced very similar
    looking results and that neither variant (stabilizing before or after
    decimation) worked well, as demonstrated in our supplementary
    material. We also tried a more sophisticated temporal coarse-to-fine
    stabilization technique that stabilized the original video, then
    subsampled the frames in time by a small amount, and then repeated
    this process until the desired video length was reached. While this
    approach worked better than the previous two approaches (see the
    video), it still did not produce as smooth a path as the new technique
    developed in this paper, and significant distortion and wobble
    artifacts accumulated due to the repeated application of
    stabilization.

still sucks

Yeah, it looks amazing. If the video is taken at faster speed (like 10X), then they can get a smooth realtime result when slowing it down at post processing.