Google Brings Roving Text Effects to Apple's Live Photos in 'Motion Stills' App Update

Friday December 16, 2016 2:37 AM PST by Tim Hardwick
Google has released an update to its Motion Stills app that lets users create moving text effects for inclusion in their videos.

Motion Stills is designed to create unique GIFs from Live Photo images captured with the iPhone 7, iPhone 6s, iPhone 6s Plus, and iPhone SE. The app was released earlier this year and its main features were subsequently integrated into Google Photos for iOS.

googlemotionstills
The update means that users can add motion-tracked text overlays to their high-resolution videos and fun gifs, as described and demonstrated in the company's research blog post.
We've added motion text so you can create moving text effects, similar to what you might see in movies and TV shows, directly on your phone. With Motion Text, you can easily position text anywhere over your video to get the exact result you want. It only takes a second to initialize while you type, and a tracks at 1000 FPS throughout the whole Live Photo, so the process feels instantaneous.
The update also brings Google's RAISR machine learning technology to the app to create super-resolution detail in images, adds 3D Touch support to the interface, and introduces fully automatic cinemagraphs – looping moving images in which the foreground subject moves while the background remains static.

Google's updated Motion Stills app for iPhone and iPad can be downloaded from the App Store for free. [Direct link]



Tags: Google, Motion Stills
12 comments


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WBRacing
36 months ago
I wonder in Apple HQ, what goes on.

Do Apple think such developments are beneath them, are unwanted, or do they simply not have the resources available?

It just seems like yet another kind of thing I would expect them to be implementing, not their rivals, as seems to be more the norm.
Rating: 4 Votes
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69Mustang
36 months ago
Apple needs to pay attention to this. Google just made a gimmicky feature a little less gimmicky.
Rating: 1 Votes
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ike1707
36 months ago
It'd be nice if they gave two sh*ts about keeping Hangouts up to date. All the potential of Whatsapp and they're just too busy with their other 5(or however many) chat apps :oops:
Rating: 1 Votes
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gaanee
36 months ago
Google and Microsoft, both are developing useful apps on the iOS platform especially using machine learning, while Apple seems to be doing only incremental updates in terms of exploring the full potential of integrating machine learning into apps. iPhone does add new hardware features but it's Google and Microsoft who make full use of these features with their apps - Google Motion Stills, Microsoft Pix...
Looks like Apple is getting into the same phase of being complacent as what happened to Microsoft with Windows XP,
having customers already locked into their ecosystem, now showing very little incentive for further developing their software to compete with Google and Microsoft.
Rating: 1 Votes
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69Mustang
36 months ago

Hangouts is truly awful. High in bandwidth and cpu consumption, low in quality. Facetime wipes the floor with it for 1:1 conversations.

For a lot of people, Facetime has one glaring deficiency. Platform locked. It's a decent feature no doubt, but limited in widespread usefulness.
Rating: 1 Votes
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