Motion Stills — Now on Android

Last year, we launched Motion Stills, an iOS app that stabilizes your Live Photos and lets you view and share them as looping GIFs and videos. Since then, Motion Stills has been well received, being listed as one of the top apps of 2016 by The Verge and Mashable. However, from its initial release, the community has been asking us to also make Motion Stills available for Android. We listened to your feedback and today, we're excited to announce that we’re bringing this technology, and more, to devices running Android 5.1 and later!

Motion Stills on Android: Instant stabilization on your device.

With Motion Stills on Android we built a new recording experience where everything you capture is instantly transformed into delightful short clips that are easy to watch and share. You can capture a short Motion Still with a single tap like a photo, or condense a longer recording into a new feature we call Fast Forward. In addition to stabilizing 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!

New streaming pipeline
For this release, we redesigned our 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, we are able to immediately stabilize the recording while still performing loop optimization over the full sequence. All this leads to instant results after recording — no waiting required to share your new GIF.

Capture using our streaming pipeline gives you instant results.

In order to display your Motion Stills stream immediately, our algorithm computes and stores the necessary stabilizing transformation as a low resolution texture map. We leverage this texture to apply the stabilization transform using the GPU in real-time during playback, instead of writing a new, stabilized video that would tax your mobile hardware and battery.

Fast Forward
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, we encode 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.

Fast Forward condenses your recordings into easy to share clips.

Try out Motion Stills
Motion Stills is an app for us to experiment and iterate quickly with short-form video technology, gathering valuable feedback along the way. The tools our users find most fun and useful may be integrated later on into existing products like Google Photos. Download Motion Stills for Android from the Google Play store—available for mobile phones running Android 5.1 and later—and share your favorite clips on social media with hashtag #motionstills.

Acknowledgements
Motion Stills would not have been possible without the help of many Googlers. We want to especially acknowledge the work of Matthias Grundmann in advancing our stabilization technology, as well as our UX and interaction designers Jacob Zukerman, Ashley Ma and Mark Bowers.