Behind the Motion Photos Technology in Pixel 2 | Hacker News Reader

Behind the Motion Photos Technology in Pixel 2

research.googleblog.com

58 pointsPleaseHelpMe10 comments

I love learning and reading about the technology behind some of my favorite features. Motion Photos (and Apple's version as well) has been one of the biggest "I didn't know I wanted this" features on modern smartphones for me.

I've taken a lot of pictures of my dogs over the years but the pure joy I had when one of the first photos I took with my new phone turned into a looping 1 second video was surprising to me. I'm really looking forward to this summer when I get to take too many photos of my new kid.

Now if only I could directly upload these to Instagram without having to manually loop them...

One thing I want to ask google is, why can't I browse through my previously-taken motion photos when I'm in a dead cell zone?

I went to the aquarium this weekend, took a lot of motion photos- but when scrolling through them in the gift shop, the "motion on" button just turned into an eternal loading icon. Even on photos I had taken the previous week.

If you have smart storage on, those photos are not saved on the device but in the cloud.

The local copies usually stick around a lot longer, I think 2-3 months. Perhaps the original poster ran out of storage, which triggered more aggressive purging?

nope. Have several gigs free. This is something else. The pictures all load when I'm in a dead cell spot, but the looping clips don't.

Interestingly, it all works fine and quickly in airplane mode. My theory is that before it plays the video, it checks settings to see whether it's online, and then makes a blocking call to a google server to, like, increment a view counter or something.

Google's computational photo/video expertise is so far ahead of any traditional camera manufacturer..

I wish they would release a prosumer Android camera with a 1"+ sensor, perhaps m43 mount, 10bit video and large bitrates - with all of their computational photo goodies.

Right, can you imagine a Sony RX100 with the post processing of a Pixel 2?

Then again, maybe we don't need that additional step and we are already at the point where your phone is enough: https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/9/17097696/pixel-2xl-geneva-...

Yeah, it's getting closer. With fast enough sensor they could probably do HDR+ on video too, like HDRx on RED cameras. If they had a 10bit HEVC video profile for recording, they could store more of that extended DR too.

Some things will be out of reach with a single small lens phone - depth of field on video, and selection of focal lengths/fov. And small sensors always have worse noise performance (quantum efficiency)

A mount would require long term commitment to the system. Something Google would culturally have a problem with.

This looks really similar to Apple's Live Photos with a bit of video stabilization.

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