Last year Google took the helpful step of assisting iPhone owners get more use from the excellent Live Photos feature.
Thanks to the Motion Stills app, iOS users could not only stabilise their often-shaky Live Photos, but transform them into the internet’s favorite currency, animated GIFs.
Now Google has finally brought the app to its own mobile platform, minus the innate usefulness.
Of course, Android doesn’t have a Live Photos feature, so a Motion Still is just a 3 second video, which can also be shared as a GIF. Perhaps it should have just called it Motion?
The new app does have the ability of instant frame-by-frame processing making the clip quickly shareable without wasting precious seconds on rendering.
In a blog post Google explains: “For this release, we redesigned our existing iOS video processing pipeline to use a streaming approach that processes each frame of a video as it is being recorded. By computing intermediate motion metadata, we are able to immediately stabilize the recording while still performing loop optimization over the full sequence. All this leads to instant results after recording — no waiting required to share your new GIF.”
Related: Android O features
Elsewhere the app has a fast forward mode that enables you to speed up video clips, a little bit like Instagram’s Hyperlapse functionality.
This will enable users to condense longer videos in to shorter, sharable clips.
The company writes: “In addition to stabilizing your recordings, Motion Stills on Android comes with an improved trimming algorithm that guards against pocket shots and accidental camera shakes. All of this is done during capture on your Android device, no internet connection required!”
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.