Google's Motion Still app arrives on Android

By Anuj Sharma - July 21, 2017
motion stills
You can capture a short Motion Still with a single tap like a photo, or condense a longer recording into a new feature that the Google calls Fast Forward.

One year after launching on iOS, Google Motion Still app is now available on the Android operating system – but in a different form.

The Motion Stills app on iOS stabilises your Live Photos and lets you view and share them as looping GIFs and videos. Since, Android does not have Live Photos feature, thus the Motion Still is simply a camera app that exports GIF. 

You can capture a short Motion Still with a single tap like a photo, or condense a longer recording into a new feature that the Google calls Fast Forward.

In addition to stabilising 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!

For this release, Google has redesigned their 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, the app stabilises the recording while still performing loop optimisation over the full sequence. All this leads to instant results after recording — no waiting required to share your new GIF.

Fast Forward allows you to speed up and condense a longer recording into a short, easy to share clip. The same pipeline described above allows Fast Forward to process up to a full minute of video, right on your phone.

You can even change the speed of playback (from 1x to 8x) after recording. To make this possible, Google encodes videos with a denser I-frame spacing to enable efficient seeking and playback.

We also employ additional optimizations in the Fast Forward mode. For instance, we apply adaptive temporal downsampling in the linear solver and long-range stabilization for smooth results over the whole sequence.

Motion Stills for Android is available for mobile phones running Android 5.1 and later.

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