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Comment by devindotcom | Hacker News Reader

This rebranding of video as "live photos" ("they can have sound!") is cracking me up.

For the same price, a video (or a still from a video) doesn't look nearly as good as a photo. The development here is packaging a high-quality still inside a video and doing compression in a way that doesn't kill the photo.

Think about it - why do professional photographers bother with shutters or try to time the perfect shots? Why not just constantly shoot video and pull frames out of it later? Because it would look like crap.

This wouldn't be hard to imitate. Record the live preview into a 3 second buffer. When the user presses the shutter, switch into still mode, take a real photo, wait 1.5 seconds, and then write both the buffer and the photo into the same archive. On playback, by default show the normal photo, but on whatever UI gesture, play the first 1.5 seconds of the video, then the photo for one frame, then the next 1.5 seconds of the video.

Only barrier I could see to re-implementing this on other phones is long wait times while the camera switches modes, during which information is lost.

>[W]hy do professional photographers bother with shutters or try to time the perfect shots? Why not just constantly shoot video and pull frames out of it later?

Photographers are doing this.

https://news.creativecow.net/story/879117

>"RED cameras allow Inez and Vinoodh to simultaneously capture high-resolution images for their photographs along with their artistic videos"

An entry-level RED (Scarlet Dragon) is $16k. A top-end Nikon (D3X) is $8k.

You can get to comparable image quality, but it's going to cost you.

I'm not suggesting people should take videos instead of photos. It was just ridiculous the way they trotted it out as a brand new and of course revolutionary idea, considering it has been done before and also is just video taken simultaneously with stills, something camcorders have done for a decade.

I know - we can call them "motion pictures"!

You're missing the point of live photos then. They're not supposed to be video, they're supposed to be photos plus a little extra.

I assume, by their explanation, that it's actually a normal 12MP still image, jpg/raw, and the "live photo" is an additional video along side the picture that opens seamlessly when you activate it.

Two separate files tied together by the UI.

That "Live Photo" will still be a normal jpg

Next up: "Live photos can now be 10 seconds long, for more information than ever before!"

Nikon already has this for their consumer 1 series cameras. They call it Motion Snapshot.

Canon has something similar too, though I think the video part on theirs is only 720p.

Yep. 1.5s 12 MP videos (0.75s before and after) as "live photos".

Yes, and my Nokia windows phone has had this feature for a year.

I think they should have left the name as Zoe.

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