Motion Stills — Google made an iPhone app that turns Live Photos into amazing GIFs. Photos are an extension of our memories, and our memories are never still. Motion Stills is a pilot from Google that brings your Live Photos back to life with advanced stabilization and rendering. Turn your photos into GIFs that loop forever, or edit them together into epic movies.
Turn your Live Photos into cinematic and beautiful Motion Stills with Google’s stabilization technology.
• Share your Motion Stills as looping GIFs directly in your favorite messaging app.
• Browse through your Live Photos stream, or flip through one-by-one and watch them auto-play.
• Create epic movies by combining your Motion Stills together with just a swipe.
Google’s approach, developed within the company’s research lab, is actually way cooler than a basic Live Photos to GIF converter. Motion Stills uses its own video stabilization algorithms to take what might otherwise be a shaky Live Photo and turn it into a smooth GIF that you’ll actually want to see repeat.
How does Google manipulate your original Live Photo and turn it into that? Here’s how the blog post explains it:
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 video game.
