Google's new Motion Stills app creates stabilized GIFs from Live Photos

Jos

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Google has announced a new iOS app called Motion Stills that will allow you to save any Live Photo as a GIF you’ll be able to share with anyone -- not just other iPhones. While I can’t say if a lot of people are actually using Apple’s glorified moving images format, there’s a potentially more interesting aspect to Google’s new app: it uses the company’s video stabilization technology to remove shakiness from the resulting loop.

Google says the app will figure out optimal start and end points to create a smooth loop, discard blurry frames, and also separate the background from the rest of the scene to get rid of any shake. Multiple clips can be combined into a montage and, of course, GIFs can be shared on any messaging app and social network that supports the format.

The company shared a more detailed explanation in the Google Research Blog if you want to read into the technical side of things, which involves techniques such as temporal subsampling, decoupling of motion parameters, and using Google Research’s custom linear solver, GLOP. The results look impressive, at least from Google’s sample shots.

This app is a way for Google to experiment and iterate quickly on the technology needed for short video creation. The company says it hopes to integrate this feature into existing products like Google Photos based on the feedback received.

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Ah, "Live Photos". My wife and I love making fun of the Apple commercial: "This is a photo of a cat, and this a li -VIDEO- of a cat" The "VIDEO" is what we yell over the *****ic commercial. Are Apple Fans so stupid that if Apple renames a 3 second video, they actually believe it's something new?
 
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