Have you tried out Cinemagr.am yet?
A cinemagraph is a specific type of animated .gif image. Usually, only part of the scene is animated, with the rest more closely resembling a still photo. Here is the example from Wikipedia’s article:
Now there’s an iPhone app to help you make these, without any video editing experience. Cinemagr.am lets you take a video on the iPhone, select the portion you wish to be animated, apply filters to the image, and then converts it into an animated .gif to upload to their own server as well as Twitter or Facebook or Tumblr. I’ve only made a few, but I’m hooked.
There are only two drawbacks I’ve seen, and only one of those is with the app. That is the very short video length limit. I have seen great cinemagraphs that last 5 or 10 seconds or more, but Cinemagr.am limits you to only a couple of seconds (it provides a trimming feature to get your video down to size).
The other problem is with the hardware — it’s hard to hold the iPhone perfectly still while pressing the record/stop recording button, and you do need to hold it perfectly still — otherwise the area in motion will move oddly relative to the still portions of your cinemagraph. At least the video-trimming feature lets you trim out the button-presses; I still shake a bit just holding the phone. I try to rest the phone on some hard surface for my videos.
Cinemagr.am is definitely recommended. Go find me and friend me!
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