Google releases Motion Stills for iOS, uses stabilized GIFs to create looping video content

The animated gif is by no means dead.

It’s just become high res looping video clips.

On Tuesday, Google announced the release of Motion Stills, an iOS app from its Google Research division that takes stabilized GIFs and creates looping videos out of them that can be shared via messaging or social media.

The app cites that it’s able to achieve a 40x speedup by using techniques such as temporal subsampling, decoupling of motion parameters, and using Google Research’s custom linear solver, GLOP. This, in turn, adds additional speed and conserves storageby computing low-resolution warp textures to perform real-time GPU rendering, just like in a video game.

From here, Motion Stills separates the background from the rest of the scene using a novel method that classifies motion vectors into foreground (red) and background (green) in a temporally consistent manner.

The app can be used both online and offline and doesn’t require you to log in to your Google account and users can post their work to the #motionstill hash tag if desired.

Motion Stills is available for free and requires iOS 9.0 or later to install and run.

If you’ve tried the app out and have any feedback to offer, let us know in the comments.

Via Google and the App Store