Google's Motion Stills App Brings Some New Tricks to Live Photos
Google’s latest app is perfect for anyone who enjoys capturing Live Photos on their iPhone. Along with converting any Live Photo to an animated GIF, the unique Motion Stills can do a lot more.
Getting stable
An example of the image stabilization technology in the app.
My favorite feature is motion stabilization that can tame any jerky Live Photo.
Google talked more about the technology in a blog post:
We pioneered this technology by stabilizing hundreds of millions of videos and creating GIF animations from photo bursts. Our algorithm uses linear programming to compute a virtual camera path that is optimized to recast videos and bursts as if they were filmed using stabilization equipment, yielding a still background or creating cinematic pans to remove shakiness.
Our challenge was to take technology designed to run distributed in a data center and shrink it down to run even faster on your mobile phone. We achieved a 40x speedup by using techniques such as temporal subsampling, decoupling of motion parameters, and using Google Research’s custom linear solver, GLOP. We obtain further speedup and conserve storage by computing low-resolution warp textures to perform real-time GPU rendering, just like in a videogame.
When making a video loop, special technology can also identify the optimal start and end frame while discarding any blurry frames.
You can even combine Live Photos to make fun and interesting movies.
All of the results from the app can be shared via messaging or social networks.
Wrap-up
The results can easily be shared to anyone or uploaded to YouTube.
Motion Stills is designed for the iPhone and can be downloaded now on the App Store for free. As a nice touch, no Internet connection is needed to run the app as all of the work is done on your phone.
Just as a reminder, you’ll actually need an iPhone 6s or iPhone 6s Plus to capture a Live Photo.
Even though I only used the app for a few minutes, I came away extremely impressed. Motion Stills is simple enough for anyone to learn and use, and it really allows users to create something cool with Live Photos.
And even you’re not interested in any of the other major features, it’s by far the best Live Photos to animated GIF converter in the App Store.
Nice job, Google.
Along with the Gboard Keyboard, which was released back in May, the Apple adversary continues to make some of the most useful iOS apps out there.