Samsung’s Galaxy S24 phones are the kind of minor year-over-year refresh we’ve come to expect from the world’s second-highest selling phone brand. Samsung is leaning hard into AI-powered functionality in selling its new phones: Galaxy AI can, for example, help you write text messages, or generate transcripts of voice recordings, complete with labels for different speakers. It also powers a feature Samsung calls Instant Slow-mo, which, as its name implies, instantly applies a slow motion effect to ordinary videos in the Samsung Gallery app.
I’ve been playing with Instant Slow-mo for a few days, and like most AI things right now, it’s a little rough around the edges. But when it works, it’s easy to see how it — or something like it — could become a standard in the mobile photography toolbox someday soon.
The Instant Slow-mo experience is as simple as it seems. When playing back most videos in Samsung Gallery, you can press and hold to apply a slow-motion effect to the playback. To permanently slow a video down, you’ll need to pop into the video editor interface, but it’s no more complicated than making most other basic video tweaks; you access the tool through a prominent button plainly labeled Adjust speed. You can use Instant Slow-mo on videos between 720p and 4K resolution, whether you recorded the video yourself or not.
Instant Slow-mo tries to fill in the gaps between real frames in your video using generative AI. In my experience, results are mixed. Video shot at 30 frames per second can be slowed down to half or quarter speed; 60 FPS video can go as slow as one-eighth. Source videos at 60 FPS universally produce better results — with more frames to work with, Samsung’s algorithms don’t have to generate as many frames, minimizing the visual weirdness characteristic of today’s AI-generated video.
It seems to me like the sweet spot for 60 FPS video is 1/4 speed; 30 FPS video is better suited to 1/2 speed. At those settings, the resulting video still looks relatively natural, and at a glance, could often pass for video actually recorded at a high frame rate. Slowing 60 FPS video to 1/8 speed or 30 FPS video to 1/4 speed means more generated frames have to be inserted, and depending on the content of your source video, the results can sort of have a “Will Smith eating spaghettti” feel to them.
What’s happening in the video you’re slowing down will also impact the quality of your final video. For example, a slow-mo video of a car driving by at a low speed will turn out looking more natural than one of a dog erratically chasing a toy. That kind of limitation is annoying, given people will obviously want to use this feature to slow down video of fast-moving things. But generative AI is still relatively new, and if Samsung keeps up development on Instant Slow-mo, it’ll surely improve over time.
As a feature that doesn’t get in the way or present any obvious moral dilemmas, Instant Slow-mo is a very clever implementation of generative AI — and I say that as someone already pretty burnt out on AI-everything hype. In its current implementation, its usefulness is limited. You’re not going to get perfectly smooth slow motion video out of it, even in ideal circumstances, and Instant Slow-mo’s misses are often laughably bad. If you just want to add some flare to a cute video of your cat, though, it can be a lot of fun. Instant Slow-mo isn’t a reason to run out and spend $1,300 on a a Galaxy S24 Ultra today, but assuming the tech behind it continues to improve, I could easily see AI-powered slow motion becoming a common feature in high-end smartphone cameras — and not just ones from Samsung.
Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra
Samsung’s Galaxy S24 series has more AI features than you can shake a stick at — including Instant Slow-mo, which lets you add a slow motion effect to video after you’ve taken it. It doesn’t always hit, but Samsung’s generative AI can pump out fairly natural looking slow-mo video often enough that the feature is worth trying.
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