[ricket]

The Pix example looks like a cinemagraph. They can be really neat and beautiful. There is a popular subreddit, /r/cinemagraphs, and other various google results. Maybe those are examples of what you could accomplish with Pix - but surely you would still need some manual touchup to make it loop perfectly as it should.

[nothis]

There was something happening to "cinemagraphs" in the few years since they became popular. I'm pretty sure it started with this blog: http://iwdrm.tumblr.com/ It took movie scenes/moments and tried to capture their essence in a few frames (of a GIF beneath tumblrs file size restrictions, as an additional challenge). The resultes were quite breathtaking and some of the best, to me, feel very "alive". You could see people breathe and blink and stuff:

http://67.media.tumblr.com/cf5c72b69133541626d6c1e7ff313926/...

Reddit has turned this into a kind of Matrix-time-freeze effect that looks totally unnatural:

http://i.imgur.com/FERUo.gif

It's a totally different thing. If Pix managed to do the first type of "cinemagraph" automatically, that would be pretty cool. But it seems to be more the second type of "cut out some part of the image and make it not move" type of animation. Too bad.