Some say that with a photo you can capture the essence of a moment, others prefer to shoot videos with the camera. To merge the two approaches, a type of moving image (the GIF format) was invented where a small part of video is looped continuously.
The evolution of the GIF is the GIF cinemagraph where, instead of looping a piece of video, a part of it is isolated which repeats itself in a loop while everything else remains motionless .
To create a Cinemagraph GIF, until now, you had to be an expert in Photoshop with a good command of professional photo editing software.
Now, thanks to Microsoft, you can create GIF Cinemagraph with a few clicks, starting from any video, both films and recordings made with the camera of the mobile phone.
READ ALSO: Take animated GIF photos from Android and iPhone
Microsoft Research has released a new free program called Cliplets that allows you to put photos and videos together by creating small multimedia clips where only a part of the image moves, while everything else remains still.
For example, if you have a video where a person makes a funny grimace, to highlight it you can select his figure and see this grimace in a loop, while all the rest of the video remains with the still image.
Other examples are instead shots of landscapes where, repeating in loop the movement of the sea water and leaving everything else stationary, you get an animated photo.
The interface is really simple: to create a new GIF Cinemagraph, just select a video from your computer by clicking on the Open button.
A scene no longer than 10 minutes must be selected from the video using the cursors.
After selecting the part of the video concerned, click on the right side and add a new Layer .
After adding the video fragment, you must surround the area you want to keep playing with the mouse, knowing that then everything else will remain paused.
Other Layers can also be added, to make several pieces of the video move simultaneously.
For each Layer you can choose whether to play it normally or to loop it .
There is also an option called Mirror to make the chosen video part move back and forth (while with the loop it always starts over again).
After applying the effect, you can press Play down to see the result.
From the sliders at the top, on the other hand, you can choose the moment in which the loop or playback of the selected layer must begin.
The program is simple and semi-automatic but also very powerful and, depending on the options chosen, the result can change and can also become very complex.
To learn how to use it, you can do as many experiments as you want or you can start by watching the video tutorials made available by Microsoft.
In the gallery of examples there are instead the various uses that can be made of the program.
Microsoft Cliplets can be installed for free on 32-bit or 64-bit Windows PCs.
There is also a special version as a Windows Phone application called Blink Cliplets .
At the end the 10 second video can be saved with the MP4 format but it can also be converted to GIF using one of the programs to convert videos or through those services to transform the videos into GIF images .
