Gifpop.io – Print gifs with the magic of lenticular printing

http://gifpop.io/

by tpsc • 13 years ago

235 111 13 years ago

gifpop.io

bigtech• 13 years ago

Super cool. Wondering if the prices are the same for original art as for the artist generated works.

thebiglebrewski3• 13 years ago

Hey, this is a great idea! Are you going to put out an API for this?

goldenkey• 13 years ago

You should elaborate on whether you mean an affiliate API or something else. An API means nothing when the subject is a user-catered service

thebiglebrewski3• 13 years ago

Ok sure, let me elaborate. Will you have an API where I'll be able to send a request with a gif and an address to send it to, similar to lob?

devindotcom• 13 years ago

10 frames is a little scanty, but I think the idea is great. I'm afraid most of my favorite gifs won't fit, but using this type of display is forehead-slappingly obvious - now that they've done it, of course.

shashashasha26• 13 years ago

Hi, thanks! 10 frames is a little short right now we agree, and we're working with our manufacturer to get even more. The main constraint is the registration accuracy between the lens and the print, which gets super hard when printing more than a few frames.

swashboon• 13 years ago

Have you tested making "loops" with larger frame counts by example printing out a strip and taping the ends together and spinning it to create a movie effect? Does that make sense?

ljf• 13 years ago

I want to see more shots of the actual prints though, I only saw one in the video, be good to get a better idea of the quality of the print and the motion.

shashashasha26• 13 years ago

Thanks! Here are some more links to gifs we've printed for artists: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/338114/gifs/by_me/mrdiv-... https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/338114/gifs/by_me/dvdp-8... And here's one of the very first we made, only with four frames and with a lower quality manufacturer, but it was a gift for a friend: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/338114/gifs/by_me/firstg...

Semaphor• 13 years ago

That Immortal business card is amazing :D

highphive• 13 years ago

Awesome idea at a pretty reasonable price. Regarding the video... they might want to invest in some acting lessons haha.

shashashasha26• 13 years ago

Yeah we are so bad at acting :)

We even knocked over our camera while filming the shot referencing the BitBucket "Spooning" video: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/338114/gifs/by_me/kickst... reference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYBjVTMUQY0

jimzvz• 13 years ago

I liked the video. I hate it when people take themselves too seriously.

Good luck to the team.

sarah2079• 13 years ago

This is an awesome idea. I would love the option to upload a short video clip instead of a gif though, and have it take 10 evenly spaced frames from the video. My nieces (ages 8 & 10) would love to use this to make prints of themselves in action, but it would be easier for them to be able go straight from a video taken with a phone to a printed product.

shashashasha26• 13 years ago

Thanks! We currently do support Vine and Instagram video, and you can pick a short clip from there. Processing all videos in all formats is a little tricky right now and it's helpful to have the pre-constraint of those social networks. Taking video from a phone is a great idea though!

doctorwho5• 13 years ago

It's pretty easy to extract all the image data from ANY video source using FFMPEG. If the command line version doesn't fit into your workflow, there's always libavcodec (what FFMPEG is based on). Give me a shout if you're interested in supporting any and all video formats.

Sir_Cmpwn2• 13 years ago

Expanding on what doctorwho said:

    ffmpeg -i input.whatever frame-%04d.png

Explode virtually any video format into frames, assuming that you've configured ffmpeg generously at compile time.

menubar• 13 years ago

Pretty sure you can do that in Photoshop and/or specialty apps. See "Cinemagraphs/Cinemagrams".

For example: http://www.reddit.com/r/Cinemagraphs/

adamryman• 13 years ago

This might help http://gifmachine.xwl.me/

skyebook• 13 years ago

We were lucky enough to have Sha and Rachel come to ultravisual for lunch yesterday, first time I got to see some of the lenticulars in person and they look awesome. I think they're taking this in a really fun direction, can't wait to see what people make with the service :)

nthitz• 13 years ago

It would be cool if the user could pick the 10 frames out of the gif rather than requiring 10 sequential frames!

PavlovsCat• 13 years ago

With CSS transforms and javascript, it might be possible to make some kind of in-browser preview of the final result even!

jypepin• 13 years ago

Omg this is an amazing idea! I love gifs so much, I will definitely try this out!

wnevets• 13 years ago

I wish I would of though of this, pretty clever idea.

kadjar• 13 years ago

Is there really no way to see the pricing structure before I upload things? That's frustrating.

shashashasha26• 13 years ago

That's great feedback! We've been so rushed to get it out the door for the holidays that we're lacking some basic information up front. We'll get that up shortly!

For now, some price/sizing deets:

$12 each — 2.125" x 3.375" — Business Card

$12 each — 2.75" x 2.75" — Small Square

$15 each — 3.5" x 5.0" — Postcard

$15 each — 5.0" x 5.0" — Large Square

cadr• 13 years ago

$12 for a single business card?

I feel like I would be better served by stapling my existing business card to a $10 bill...

melvinmt• 13 years ago

What's the delivery time? I would love to print a couple of these for christmas.

eberyvody• 13 years ago

agree

biot2• 13 years ago

I know this ship has sailed, but the G in GIF is pronounced like in "gin", not like in "gig".

Pxtl2• 13 years ago

Then they should've called it Jif. Tasty, tasty Jif.

Also, my handle is pronounced "James Luxury Yacht". Which is in turn pronounced "Throatwobbler Mangrove".

dublinben• 13 years ago

As the initialization for Graphics Interchange Format, a hard g is just as appropriate as a soft g.

scoofy6• 13 years ago

As a student of philosophy of language I love/hate this debate. I'll say this, I feel badly for people who think the creator gets to control the pronunciation. Hopefully the prescriptivists will learn language evolves irregardless of whether we want it to. Whenever you think you have firm rules, you will find they will change momentarily. Let me know if you spot what I snuck in there.

shashashasha26• 13 years ago

<3 <3

We were just talking about this yesterday with some friends, and they put it nicely as "Language has no master"

knapp• 13 years ago

You snuck in "irregardless" and I claim my $5 reward.

(Maybe you also snuck in "hopefully": http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/hopeful... )

biot2• 13 years ago

I should of known its a loosing battle.

gry• 13 years ago

I upvoted this 10 times, even though it counts once. Thank you, scoofy.

Pxtl2• 13 years ago

I notice you couldn't bring yourself to use the modern oxymoronic definition of "literally"

BSeward2• 13 years ago

This is super cool. I've looked a little at lenticular printing for 3D prints but sourcing the lenses was a little more effort than I needed. I'd pay well over material cost to have someone else handle assembling. If you add an option meant for that I'd be all over it.

shashashasha26• 13 years ago

Thanks! What do you mean about adding an option for 3D prints? Do you mean doing the layering on our end? We could get you viewing angles and such so that you could upload prelayered imagery through the website normally, would that work?

rcthompson• 13 years ago

Lenticular printing can also be used to present stereoscopic images: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenticular_printing#Types_of_le...

BSeward2• 13 years ago

Layering on your end, yeah.

Per pages like http://www.microlens.com/pages/choosing_right_lens.htm different applications prefer different viewing angles.

If you can track down ideal lenses and give tips for capturing ideal photos that'd be awesome.

http://poppy3d.com/ is cute product shipping soon: they might be interested in partnering (they've had ~2900 backers on Kickstarter)

aleyan• 13 years ago

Looks fantastic.

I noticed that all the lenticulars demonstrated have horizontally aligned lenses for a final image that you rock head to heel. Why not offer a vertically aligned lenses for a final image to that you rock side to side? If I understand correctly, a user should be able to do this themselves if they flip the source image 90 degrees, but an option would be nice. There are some issues with your eyes seeing different frames with vertical lenses, but that could be used for cool stereo effects too.

shashashasha26• 13 years ago

Hi Aleyan! Yes, side to side works but it works much better when you're further away (unless you've calculated the eye spacing and distance in your imagery). We're planning on offering the option for artist prints to be printed horizontally or vertically, because some of them will be hung on walls.

thedufer• 13 years ago

Vertically-aligned is a good way to get 3D out of lenticular prints because each eye sees different images. Unfortunately, this means that things that are supposed to be 2D/animated instead of 3D/still would not look as nice as horizontally-aligned ones.

kkshin• 13 years ago

How far is the technology from being able to do this on textiles? That would be sick.

awongh• 13 years ago

also just found out about http://meshu.io through this- also a great idea!

shashashasha26• 13 years ago

Thanks! Meshu was our first project together, and we built it on Python/Django. It's been really fun and kind of crazy to have two projects with holiday rushes at the same time :)

recycleme• 13 years ago

Ok, now just combine that with t-shirts (g-shirts).

edit: awesome idea btw!

duiker1012• 13 years ago

is that my hackertyper that I see there? :D

shashashasha26• 13 years ago

YES OH MY GOD! We tried to reference a lot of our favorite memes and things in the video. Glad you caught it!

duiker1012• 13 years ago

I love the fact that people still use it ^^ Thanks for that you really made my day!

doctorwho5• 13 years ago

Very cool! I wrote code to do this back in 1995 for a company called 3DCOM. We supported full color, full page prints from a sequence of 24 images, each from a slightly different angle to produce a 3D "holographic" printout. the effect was so good you could stick your finger into the image.

At the time (the dark ages of commodity printer technology) it required an EPSON inkjet that could do at least 1200dpi. After printing you just slapped a sticky-backed lenticular lens (lined up with registration marks) on the printout and voila!

I kept one 8"x10" 3D printout of a buckyball that's still pretty impressive looking, even after nearly 20 years!

shashashasha26• 13 years ago

That's amazing! That's why we're honestly so excited about using lenticular type technologies with gifs — they both feel like dumb, old technologies that are actually kind of wonderfully straightforward, and have a lot of creative potential! If you have any photos of that buckyball print we'd love to see it!

doctorwho5• 13 years ago

I'll dig it out of its box and take a snapshot, or a little video :)

vanderZwan• 13 years ago

Twenty years from that to this? That's a pretty long time without anyone doing anything with this technology then (this doesn't sound much more advanced than what you did back then, except for the addition of internet and gifs).

EDIT: Don't get me wrong, I think it's neat this service finally exists!

doctorwho5• 13 years ago

3DCOM was going with a service model as well but the internets were pretty new to most people back then. They also got a write up in the Pipeline section of PCMagazine (new technologies section) back when suck things mattered. I think I saved a copy of that too. Time to go digging through the ancient technology box!

shashashasha26• 13 years ago

It's just the 20-year-cycle of nostalgia ;)

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2012/04/17/_the_golden_f...

mxfh• 13 years ago

My personal theory is, that it was tumblr's original arbitrary limit of 512KB (now 1MB) that elevated GIF content's artistic quality to new levels.

Before there were all kinds of GIFs, but mainly unedited direct frame sequences out of movie files, yet there was no need to keep the files small. Yet if you wanted to see them in your dashboard stream in their full animated glory, the GIFs had to be kept under that limit at all costs.

Creative workarounds were found (minimizing frames/short loops/masking out static parts of the image) to create outstanding rebloggable content worth sharing.

If tumblr didn't have that limit, I'm pretty sure we wouldn't be seeing the current GIF-renaissance, maybe reaction-GIFs, but for sure not stuff like:

iwdrm, mr. div, head like an orange

file under: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_limitation

judk• 13 years ago

Explain what lenticular is on the home page, and maybe show a photo of an actual example?

shashashasha26• 13 years ago

That's great feedback. The first image is an actual example of a gif card at work (hovering plays the animation), and the third link is an explanation of lenticular printing. We should make it more clear though!

ntaylor• 13 years ago

Getting errors when I attempt to upload an image in Chrome (and IE).

Uncaught SecurityError: Access to 'localStorage' is denied for this document.

wehadfun• 13 years ago

put this on etsy

HyprMusic• 13 years ago

This is very cool. Is there any particular reason why non-GIF version is limited to just 2 pictures? It would be awesome to be able to manually upload a number of images, especially with phones supporting burst mode.

shashashasha26• 13 years ago

We'd love to offer manual upload of a sequence of images, we just don't want people to get the idea that they can upload 10 unique images. With lenticular sheets at this high framecount there's always some ghosting, so it's really for motion (gifs+video) or flipping between a couple distinct images (flip)

andersthue• 13 years ago

Can they do animated ascii art too?

geekfactor• 13 years ago

Just placed an order. Looking forward to receiving the card.

You guys should consider doing affiliate deals with places like http://makeagif.com. (That's where I made my animated GIF in the first place.)

yefim• 13 years ago

This is awesome. Definitely has a Harry Potter feel to it. Love it!

csmuk• 13 years ago

OMG.

I was just looking at one of my children's books earlier and came up with exactly this idea. Two hours later, sit down on HN and someone has already done it.

Awesome work whoever did this!

shashashasha26• 13 years ago

Thank you!

XOXO

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mbxb2zaVsR1qcqj0ko1_500.gi...

Timothee• 13 years ago

I had this idea too a few months ago. I had looked at lenticular sheets and other things but stopped thinking about it eventually, not sure why. (except for the fact that is what I usually do: I have an idea, think about it for a little bit, look at how it could be done and stop there :))

I think it was a combination of the price of the individual sheets (on Amazon at least) and the need for a high quality printer and assembly (the print and the lenticular sheet need to be perfectly aligned). I was imagining a cheap service to get memes into magnets for your fridge but the prices seemed not to match this vision. Working with artists like this site is doing is definitely a great idea. I had started trying to find a local printer but I don't think I found anybody fast enough for me not to move on to a different idea.

Great work!

roywiggins• 13 years ago

This looks fantastic. I make gifs out of pictures I take on burst mode and these would be beyond perfect for presenting them. (try it at a party, it's much more fun than static pictures, also for posed group shots)

I'm waiting for flexible color solar-powered wireless e-ink displays to give the full "Harry Potter" moving-picture effect, but they're a few years out!

jasonkostempski• 13 years ago

Genius! Just one request. Crop a little off the left of the animation. I can't stop staring at the hair on that thumb. It's like watching tall grass sway in the wind.

lubujackson• 13 years ago

WHY OH WHY are there no Internet meme samples? I'd think Dramatic Chipmunk would be a shoo-in.

garthdog• 13 years ago

It'd be nice if I could upload 10 PNG files so as to not be bound by the 256 color limitation of GIFs.

jl6• 13 years ago

How good can this tech get? Could you print an ultra-high dpi image, put ultra-fine lenses over it, and turn it very slowly to get several minutes of video?

nakedrobot2• 13 years ago

You have no pricing whatsoever on your site. I had to upload a gif just to see the prices. This is probably not ideal. I'd suggest adding a pricing page :)

Gifpop.io – Print gifs with the magic of lenticular printing

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