Google should focus much more on Night Sight Video

Abner Li | Dec 12 2023 - 12:00 pm PT

Night Sight really helped establish the Pixel as a camera powerhouse early on. We’ve been waiting for a video version that takes things to the next level, and we’re almost — pending the rollout — there.

9to5Google has a rebooted newsletter that highlights the biggest Google stories with added commentary and other tidbits. Sign up to get it early in your inbox, or continue reading 9to5Google Log Out below:

It’s early days, but the advertising around Night Sight Video on the Pixel 8 Pro leaves much to be desired. For starters, Night Sight Video is framed as almost a sub-feature of Video Boost.

At a high level, Video Boost is Google’s term for footage that is uploaded to the cloud for processing. During the October keynote, Google demoed it in comparison to an iPhone 15 Pro, while we got side-by-side comparisons last week.

I’m not sold by the examples of Video Boost we have so far. To me, what version of a video people prefer feels even more subjective than still photography, as there’s more of the scene for you to critique. In Google’s example, I think the darker green mountain in the original is more natural:

Meanwhile, the difference in the footage we shot seems even more minute. To my eye, the short stone wall is ever so slightly darker in a change that I’d argue makes zero difference, while the shadow in the second clip does not seem to be as dark:

In comparison, I think the advantage of Night Sight Video is more obvious, if not objective, in that the clear goal is to let you see memories/scenes that were previously too dark to make out. Keep in mind that anything that cloud processing can recover will be a win for most people.

With that in mind, I think Night Sight Video should have taken center stage in both priority and advertising. In fact, I’d argue that Video Boost shouldn’t be out just yet so that Google could focus on Night Sight.

In my ideal world, getting to Night Sight Video is much easier than opening the Camera app’s quick preferences sheet to toggle on “Video Boost.” There should simply be a “Night Sight” tab when you’re in Video mode, just like the Photo counterpart.

Another benefit of launching Night Sight Video first is that Google, in theory, would only have to process half the amount of clips since it doesn’t have to deal with daytime Video Boosts.

Meanwhile, the Night Sight Video examples Google does have are underselling the feature. When we went hands on with the Pixel 8 Pro before the launch, Google showed us a Night Sight Video demo where you could barely make out what was happening in the original clip, but the processed version depicted the version so much more clearly.

To me, that was so much better than the Tokyo example we got at the keynote. The before-and-after examples Google provided seemed to be more focused on making the video more cinematic and stylistic than brightening the clip. Again, the latter’s success can be more easily measured than the former. Then there’s the example Google shared last week, which seems overly polished and not a relatable scene that people actually have:

Advertising around Night Sight Video should just replicate the original campaign for still photography and simply be about how the Pixel 8 Pro lets you record in the dark.