Cinemagram – create and share moving photos
you can choose a video from your library, or create a fresh one.
Videos are processed quickly compared to the other apps.
You can’t simply erase the swipes of areas you want to “unmask.” You have to undo and hope the most recent swipes are the ones you want to remove- or draw the mask all over again. If you have an intricate area to mask, the best thing to do is to create separate swipes rather than leaving your finger down and drawing over your area in one motion, since you cannot fine tune the mask. I hated the end result of my test cinemagraph of desert shrubbery blowing in the wind, framed by the mountains and desert sky. The movement of the earth behind the flowers is distracting- particularly since that portion wasn’t moving in the original image! I hope they fix this problem soon.
Uploading is quick and painless. With each upload you can choose whether to share with social networks and to use geotagging. You can also share to networks or email your image any time after the upload, You cannot tag or title your work, though you can comment on it.
You can’t save to your camera roll. BOO! You can, however, easily mail the image to yourself. Not as good a solution, but workable.
You can view your own uploads, view the most popular images or look at the latest uploads. You can view everyone’s upload or just your friends’. You can give a thumbs up to an image as well as comment on it. This app seems to have the most lively network of the three, with more “likes” and more commenting.
Flixel
I tried to make a cinemagraph of the desert and flowering shrubs scene as I had done with Cinemagram but I couldn’t. You know why? Because you can’t choose images from your camera roll; each video must be made freshly. That’s a huge drawback for me and moved this to the number two spot instantly.
I LOVE the way you create a cinemagraph: as you draw your mask over the area you want animated, that portion begins to move. You can easily see where to draw.
I also like that you can chose the start and end of your video without having to watch a looping portion of the video play over and over until you get the start/stop frames right.
EDITING: Flixel wins over Cinemagram here.
If you mask too much, you can ERASE- wonderful! You can also undo stroke by stroke. No masking, then going to a preview screen, then going back to correct it and then previewing it again, over and over. I’m a perfectionist, so the easier the editing, the better. This is great. There is no warping or movement of the still portions of an image, as with Cinemagram. I viewed one image of a boy in what appears to be a botanical garden with butterflies flittering about. In Cinemagram this would have turned out poorly, but here, only the butterflies move.
You can save your creation to your camera roll (yes!), and even save to drafts. You can easily share to social networks as well.
You can “heart”, flag or share your, or others’, images. The network seems active, with images receiving votes, though few comments.
Kinotopic
You can choose from your camera roll or take a fresh video- love it!
Editing: OK, here’s where I believe Kinotopic loses somewhat. I don’t like having to go into a menu to choose the erase, zoom, undo, and redo tools. It’s annoying and disrupts the creative process. But the erase tool combined with the zoom tool is GREAT and has helped me to fine-tune some nice imagery.
You MUST title your image or you cannot save it. People are quite creative here and I find this to be a fun feature when viewing images from around the world.
ow your image is in the stream. You can share it to social networks here if you like. You can then elect to view your kinos via your profile, or view the stream. I have found Kinotopic to be annoyingly slow to the point of showing only a spinning circle rather than images. They seem to have improved this recently, which removes my biggest complaint about Kinotopic!
You can comment and vote on images. You can view the hottest images, the latest ones, or just those of the people you are following. It’s fun to go back and look at my images to see if they got any votes.
