Apple’s iOS platform has enjoyed the services of a GIFs-maker app, Motion Stills for a year or so. The app, which is developed by Google is officially available for Android users.
The move is meant to serve Android users who have witnessed the app’s ability in sharing GIFs on the iPhone where it turns native Live Photos into stabilized, smooth GIFs.
While there are third party solutions for Android users to capture their own forms of Live Photos (a feature that is baked on iOS’s camera where photos are brought to life by creating a moving image), there is no native setting to turn it on, which is why Android users will capture short videos from the app itself. Afterward, the app will convert it to a looping video aka GIF. Similar to Live Photos, the GIF is three seconds long, but there is no static picture to go with it.
The app has other features baked into it, such as the ability to shorten a one-minute long video to a something shorter, in addition to adjusting playback speeds within a 1 – 8× after recording. Google has also noted that the app has an on-device trimming algorithm to keep accidental camera shakes and pocket shots at bay. Stabilization is handled by an Android device’s GPU during playback. Moreover, the app has redesigned the existing iOS video processing pipeline to use a streaming approach that processes each frame of a video as it is being recorded.
“In order to display your Motion Stills stream immediately, our algorithm computes and stores the necessary stabilizing transformation as a low resolution texture map. We leverage this texture to apply the stabilization transform using the GPU in real-time during playback, instead of writing a new, stabilized video that would tax your mobile hardware and battery,” says Google.
The app is available for all devices running Android 5.1 and up.
