Video Boost on Google Pixel 8 Pro is a useful low-light video tool

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When Google introduced Night Sight on the Pixel 3, it was a revelation. It was like someone had literally turned on the lights in your low-light photos. Shots that were previously impossible became possible: no tripod or flash needed. Five years later, taking photos in the dark is obsolete: almost every phone across the price spectrum comes with some form of night mode. The video, however, is a different story. Night modes for stills capture multiple frames to create a brighter image, and it's simply not possible to copy and paste the mechanics of that feature into a video that, by its nature, is already a series of images. The answer, as it seems to be lately, is to turn to AI.

When the Pixel 8 Pro launched this fall, Google Bahrain Phone Numbers List announced a feature called Video Boost with Night Sight, which would arrive in a future software update. It uses AI to process your videos, bringing out more details and enhancing color, which is especially useful for low-light clips. There's just one catch: this processing is done in the cloud on Google servers, not on your phone. As promised, Video Boost started arriving on devices a couple of weeks ago with the December Pixel update, including my Pixel 8 Pro review unit. And it's good! But it's not the defining moment that the original Night Sight was.



That speaks both to how impressive Night Sight was when it debuted and to the particular challenges that video presents to a smartphone's camera system. Video Boost works like this: First, and crucially, you need to have a Pixel 8 Pro , not a regular Pixel 8: Google didn't answer my question about why this is the case. You turn it on in your camera settings when you want to use it and then you start recording your video. Once you're done, you need to backup the video to your Google Photos account, either automatically or manually. So you wait. And wait. And in some cases, you're still waiting: Video Boost works on videos up to ten minutes long, but even a clip just a couple of minutes long can take hours to process.