Animated overlay for videos on iOS

Question

What's the common modern standard for animated video overlays? (e.g. if you want to add an animated logo to video recorded from the camera)

During research, I've found the following options:

• GIF - seems to be pretty outdated technology

• FLV - supports alpha-channel, but no longer supported by Adobe. Requires FFMPEG.

• PNG sequence - the downside of this is having multiple files for each frame.

What's the right format/technology to use?

Ideally, what is natively supported on iOS (doesn't require FFMPEG)?

Answer 1

If you want to overlay your custom video animation over video which user will be recorded I suggest to use GPUImage framework which allow a lot video/photo customization's and different graphic effects. For example how to mix two videos: nice article. Also I suggest you to read article about Chroma key which are something like standard of video/photo mixing. (because as I understand you just want make something like watermark?). GPUImage also has Chroma key filter which you can use in your purpose.

By default Apple supports h264 codec in mp4 container. So your video should be in this codec. Hope I fully answered on your question