Google Releases New 'Motion Stills' App That Stabilizes and Turns Live Photos Into GIFs and Movies

Google has released 'Motion Stills', a new app for iOS that can stabilize and turn Live Photos into GIFs and movies.

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.

Features:
• 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.




How It Works:
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 videogame.

To create loops, Google identifies optimal start and end points and discards blurry frames. As an added benefit, this fixes “pocket shots” (footage of the phone being put back into the pocket). To keep the background steady while looping, Motion Stills classifies motion vectors into foreground (red) and background (green) in a temporally consistent manner. A cascade of motion models moves motion estimation from simple to more complex models biasing results along the way.

You can download Motion Stills from the App Store for free.


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