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This article is from June 11, 2012, and is no longer current.
New Tech for Making Cinemagraphs
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By now you’ve probably at least heard of cinemagraphs, those hip, creepy-cool cousins of the animated GIF, where one part of a photo moves in an endless loop while the rest of the image is frozen. If you’ve seen a Harry Potter movie where the photos in a newspaper move, you’ve seen a cinemagraph.
If you want to try your hand at making a cinemagraph, you have a few options. If you have an iPhone, you could use a mobile app like Kinotopic or Cinemagram. Or you could use your computer and follow along with a tutorial, like the one at Photojojo that was mentioned by Pam Pfiffner a while back in one of her Best of the Blogs articles last year.
If you’re on Windows, you can try Microsoft’s free Cliplets application.
But there may be an even easier and more powerful method on the way, thanks to some researchers at UC Berkley who are working on a way to make cinemagraphs by “de-animating” portions of a video. Basically, you just draw on top of the video to indicate which parts should be allowed to move which parts should remain frozen. And the results they can achieve are pretty amazing.
This teaser video shows some interesting examples of what the technology can do:
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