L’app di Google per trasformare le Live Photos in GIF

Non fa solo quello però: le stabilizza anche migliorandole non di poco. Purtroppo non ho modo di testarla — avendo un iPhone 6 che non fa Live Photos — ma stando ai test di The Verge funziona davvero bene. Spiega Google:

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.

Un’interessante riflessione sulle gif, dalla co-fondatrice di GifPop (un servizio per stampare gif):

The inefficiency of the file format and the upload limits of the social networks themselves have created a whole ecosystem of experimentation and juggling around constraints. […]

Gifs are a dumb, limited file format, and in the end this is why they are important: they do not belong to anyone. Because of their constraints they become a design material, to be played with, challenged, and explored.

Il pezzo si trova su designmateriality.com, e consiglio di leggerlo da lì dato che è pieno di gif.