The evolution from GIF to Cinemagraph

Published by Adam Fraser on November 7, 2012

The evolution from GIF to Cinemagraph

With the arrival of the Nokia Lumia 920 and Lumia 820, you’re able to create great GIF-like images using an exclusive Nokia app called Cinemagraph. But what is a Cinemagraph? Isn’t it just a GIF? Well, yes, but there’s one thing that’s different.

A GIF is an acronym for Graphic Interchange Format – a bitmap image format.

People have been using GIFs since the format was created in 1987 and its popularity is partly due the fact you can compress the image to make it much smaller in size without degrading the quality of the image. However, it only has a colour palette of 256 colours.

In addition to this, GIFs can be animated – quite unusual for an image. This was ideal many years ago when videos would’ve taken up much needed disk space and would’ve taken a long time to download or stream.

Using a GIF also makes it very easy to embed into a website. You just upload the image and people will see a moving image; albeit a relatively small, slightly grainy one.

Here are some standard animated GIFs.


Via GIFtube

As you can see, the whole image is a moving image, much like a video. And that’s because they are, but they’ve been adapted for the GIF format.

The following images are Cinemagraphs (not taken with a Nokia Lumia).


Via – irol.trasmonte


Via mendhak


Via irol.trasmonte

As you can see the quality of the images are much better than an ordinary animated GIF; they’re not grainy, they are vivid.

With an animated GIF, it’s usually clear that you’re looking at an animated GIF. However, when you look at a Cinemagraph, you almost believe you’re looking at an actual video.

The wine from the bottle in the first image just keeps flowing, while everything else remains still. The cogs at the heart of the robot are the only parts that move and the flame on the candle in the last image flickers away while the child looks on in freeze-frame.

Now the Nokia Lumia 920 and Lumia 820 have become available, you’ll be able to create similar images to the Cinemagraphs above.

Are you looking forward to making Cinemagraphs on your new Lumia? What will you create? Sound off in the comments section below.

image credit: irol.trasmonte

Comments

  • http://www.talvbansal.com Talv

    Those “cinemagraphs” are gifs though? I just inspected the page to determine the file format of the cinemagraphs, how is the quality achieved here using the lossy gif format?

    • C38S

      Traditional GIF’s are made using heavily compressed images, that’s all. This is so they load very quickly on web pages and are light on resources. GIF’s don’t have to be lossy.

      The Cinemagraphs use a series of high quality images instead. Perhaps only having part of the image move also helps keep the file size down?? I haven’t looked into that.

      PS That cat is hilarious! It’s legs slip out from underneath.

      • http://www.talvbansal.com Talv

        ahhh i was under the impression that GIFs were all limited to 256 colours but now see that thats not the case! thanks for explaining that for me! :)

      • http://conversations.nokia.com/ Adam Fraser

        Thanks for explaining, C38S. And, yes, the cat is my favourite one, too. That jump was doomed from the start.

  • http://twitter.com/Et3rnal_ Sarmad Al-Kufaishi

    awesome :D i asked someone from Nokia while ago and he told me its gif (disappointed me) and now im so happy and waiting me per-order even more :D

  • malerocks

    Is this available on the older Lumias, i.e. the 710, 800, etc.

    • http://www.facebook.com/gmiguel83 Jorge Miguel

      I believe Nokia said that older Lumia models would get this too.

      • JackLloyd.

        Yes they did say that, with WP7.8 update they will get teh cinemagraph app/lense. Have a look at r/cinemagraphs for some real good cinemagraphs (there’s a lot of crap ones about, but there’s also a lot that are much better than the ones posted above even)

  • http://twitter.com/brudolph1211 Ben Rudolph

    I’ve heard you can’t get the Cinemagraph images off your phone? Is this true? If so is there a fix in the works?

    • http://conversations.nokia.com/ Adam Fraser

      We wrote about Nokia Lenses and the Cinemagraph app itself a couple of days ago. You can upload them to SkyDrive to get them off your phone, plus Nokia is working on an update that will allow you upload to Facebook and other social networking sites – http://conversations.nokia.com/2012/11/05/creating-better-photos-with-nokia-lenses/

      • http://www.facebook.com/gmiguel83 Jorge Miguel

        Awesome!

      • muitosabao

        please do, because it’s really needed! Saving them to skydrive is almost useless since if you pass the skydrive link you the image will display still. you need to instruct to press “view original”for it to work :(

  • Tim Rowe

    And what was wrong with PNG for this?

    • Yann Pinczon du Sel

      PNG cannot include animation.
      Only an APNG can handle animation, and I’m not sure it’s directly readable from a web page…

  • muitosabao

    Please consider an option to set the loop type! Some cinemagraphs only work if they bounce back, and not loop from the start. This option is a MUST and other apps like these on the iphone have it. Thanks for considering it.

  • csasda faetafv

    naked