
Behind the Motion Photos Technology in Pixel 2 - PleaseHelpMe
https://research.googleblog.com/2018/03/behind-motion-photos-technology-in.html
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veritas3241
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...

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knodi123
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._

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

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puzzle
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?

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knodi123
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.

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dharma1
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.

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nicpottier
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-...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/9/17097696/pixel-2xl-geneva-motor-
show-2018)

~~~
dharma1
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)

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

