New app Trash from ex-head of Vine uses AI to make short clips

A new app from the former head of video-sharing app Vine hopes to repeat the success of the cult social network by making it easier to shoot and edit short clips. Trash hopes that its secret weapon will be "computational cinematography": the app, which entered closed beta on Monday, uses machine learning "to automate the un-fun parts of video editing", automatically processing video to cut together short clips with a consistent mood and feel. A similar approach, computational photography, has already radically changed smartphone photography, enabling features such as the Pixel's Night Sight and iPhone's Portrait Mode. Trash's co-founder, Hannah Donovan, who was Vine's last general manager before the service was shut down by its owner, Twitter, said she hoped the approach would lower the barrier of entry to video editing. "We're analysing the video for a bunch of different things," Donovan said.