Google spices up Motion Stills for iOS with flying captions, automatic cinemagraphs, and more

posted by Milen Y.

Dec 16, 2016, 8:10 AM

Google spices up Motion Stills for iOS with flying captions, automatic cinemagraphs, and more

Google's Motion Stills app for iOS takes Live Photos that you've shot with your iPhone and turns them into cool-looking, perfectly stabilized and looping GIFs. Now the Big G has updated Motion Stills with even more editing tools allowing you to add motion-tracked text overlays to your clips, create automatic cinemagraphs, and more.

Motion Text allows you to add text overlays to your Live Photos, which can then automatically follow a moving object at 1000 FPS, says Google. This happens thanks to advanced machine learning algorithms capable of tracking individual object and camera movement and differentiating between the two. It's pretty neat stuff! Check out this cool example from Google:

The new version of Motion Stills can also create automatic cinemagraphs. Cinemagraphs are still photographs for the most part, but feature minor repeated movements in either the foreground or background, while everything else remains completely still. This feature also takes advantage of machine learning to freeze large portions of the Live Photo, and also employs Google's RAISR tech, which uses advanced algorithms to sharpen the end results in a natural and realistic way.

Google is promising to bring many more user-requested features to Motion Stills in the near future. If you want to see what's changed in the new version, follow the link below.