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Today, Google announced the launch of Motion Stills, a fresh iOS app that helps users stabilize the pictures they took with Live Photos made with an iOS device.
For those who aren’t familiar with this feature, Live Photos automatically captures several frames before and after you hit the camera’s shutter button. With Motion Stills, these pictures can become shareable GIFs and video clips.
Starting June 8, 2016, the app can be downloaded from the App Store. But according to Ken Conley and Matthias Grundmann of the Google Research Machine Perception team, the technology could end up integrated into other applications, such as the Google Photos cloud-based photo storage app.
The app doesn’t depend on a Wi-Fi connection and you don’t need to sign up for any service to use it. All you are required to do is give the app permission to access the photos on your device and you’re set up to use it.
Motion Stills is being released shortly after Microsoft’s Hyperlapse time-lapse video apps have become available across devices. Facebook’s Instagram also has a Hyperlapse app.
Google’s technology might be slightly different, but it is equally impressive in terms of video editing; that is especially because it shows that without intelligent modifications, Live Photos are very unstable.
“We pioneered this technology by stabilizing hundreds of millions of videos and creating GIF animations from photo bursts,” wrote Google in a blog post.
According to Conley and Grundmann, the 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.”
It was paramount that the technology needed to run even faster on smartphone and that speed was achieved by using various techniques, including temporal subsampling and decoupling of motion parameters.
As you stabilize your videos, they can be shared across any app – whether as an automatically improved version or a series of stabilized videos. A direct share button has been integrated for YouTube, even though Google’s video platform has its own stabilization tools.
The company did not reveal anything about Motion Stills coming to Android, but then again, that would be kind of pointless since there are no Live Photos on Android.
Image Source: 9to5 Mac
