Google’s new Video Boost is both awesome and mostly impractical

Over the past week or so, I’ve been giving Google’s Video Boost for Pixel 8 Pro a try, and I’ve been both impressed and frustrated by it. Google’s lagged behind Apple for years with phone-based video creation, and I think Video Boost is a novel way for Google – largely a software/services company – to try and do something a bit special and over-the-top to compete. And in some ways, it actually works very well!

What’s good about Pixel Video Boost

The way it all comes together is very simple. You choose to capture your video with Video Boost enabled, record as you normally would, and after you hit stop, your video is uploaded to Google’s servers to be doctored up a bit. The process is pretty seamless and simple, and regardless of the lighting conditions, I’ve been very impressed by how well Video Boost handles video clean up. Take a look at the before/after examples below:

What makes it unusable at this point for some cases

As good as the end product is, there’s an absolute Achilles heel that undermines the entire effort in most situations: time. I thought when I wrote about using Video Boost the first time around that my upload and processing times were a bit of a fluke. Turns out, that’s not the case at all.

In fact, the time it takes to process your video on Google’s servers turns out to be far longer than I even thought. I recorded a 1-minute video as a test since that is the general length of many short-form video platforms. I did this at 7:25 AM and didn’t get a notification from Google Photos that my video was done until after 11:00 AM. It pushed nearly 4 hours to process a 60-second video.

And that one downfall makes Video Boost a bit of a joke right now. For video creation on the go, who in the world is planning a 3-4 hour waiting time for a video that needs to be uploaded to YouTube Shorts? I imagine going to something like the Chromebook Plus event that happened in October where we would want to capture and upload things pretty quickly and would clearly want to use Video Boost for that sort of content.

The workflow for necessary for offsetting every video by 3-4 hours doesn’t even make any sense. Sure, if you are recording a video of a family event or something you simply want to capture for a memory down the road, Video Boost is fine since you perhaps don’t need to have it right away.

But in any situation where you need to record solid, great-looking video for use at any point close to the time you captured it, Video Boost is essentially useless. And I understand video processing can take some time, but there’s simply no reason for a 1-minute clip to take half of the work day. I fear if Google can’t get these rendering/processing times down quite a bit, their big play to compete with Apple’s video prowess will be over before it even begins.