There is a ton of video footage taken at each holiday. These videos may not all be the most interesting of times, but to sift through them and create a video that highlights the best of your trip and holiday can be quite a time consuming job. Now the bright sparks at the Georgia Institute of Technology have made this job a whole lot simpler for you.

They have come up with a novel software program that allows you to automatically sort and edit untouched video footage into the best clips of the material available. Now you don’t have to physically spend hours doing the editing manually, this software does it for you and creates a clip with all the highlights of your holiday.

The algorithm developed by students Daniel Castro and Vinay Bettadapura analyzes the video for images with ideal artistic properties. The scenes that qualify make it to the final version while those which fail simply don’t make the cut. A two week vacation with 24.5 hours of footage was converted quite efficiently into a highlight reel of under a minute. How’s that for cutting things fine?

Naturally this science project will need some improvement and the algorithm will have to make more decisions to make an actual workable home video, but its off to a pretty good start.