Keep a Moment as a Film or a Live Photo: What Encore Actually Saves | Encore

The short answer

Encore Pro covers exactly two actions: saving a whole piece as a film, and keeping the frame you are watching as a Live Photo. The film is rendered at 1080×1920 and lands in your Photos; the Live Photo is a 1.5-second, 15 fps rendering of the slow push that was already on screen, moving in the direction you saw it move. Everything else — browsing every piece Encore picks out of your library, rewatching any of them, all five rhythms — is free and unlimited, because the wall is on content leaving the app, not on looking at your own memories. No account, no upload, no ads, and no lifetime tier: Pro is an auto-renewing subscription, monthly or yearly.

Encore is iPhone-only and needs iOS 17 or later.

Why you are here: a recap you cannot keep is a demo

The question behind this page is rarely "how do I export." It is: I watched a piece of my own life go past, one frame of it was the frame, and I did not keep it.

That gap is where most of this category fails. A generated memory reel is a viewing experience; if the only outcome is that it played, the app showed you a demo of itself. And the obvious answer — screenshot — is a bad one. A screenshot of a slow push is a still of a crop, and it drops the one thing that made the moment legible in the first place: the movement.

So the real question is not whether an app can export a video. Every app can. It is whether what comes out is the thing you were actually looking at.

Two artifacts, and only one of them replaces a screenshot

Keeping a whole piece renders the entire cut to a 1080×1920 MP4 and saves it into your library. Three details decide whether that is worth paying for:

• It renders from the same playback schedule the stage just used, so the film matches the cut you watched instead of a re-decided version of it. Re-entering the export page does not start a second render.
• Frames are pulled and encoded one at a time on this iPhone, and a frame that fails to load is an explicit failure, not a silent skip. A film quietly missing one of its photos is not something you would notice on playback, and it is precisely the thing you paid for.
• Saving asks for add-only Photos permission. Encore never deletes, modifies or moves your library — keeping a piece only ever adds to it.

Keeping one frame is the other half. The frame you are watching is composed into a Live Photo: 1.5 seconds at 15 fps, at most 1440 px on the long edge, at your photo's own aspect ratio. The cover still is taken at the midpoint, so the thumbnail and the movement differ as little as possible.

Here is the honest limit, and it is the one most pages skip: the motion in that Live Photo is rendered, not recovered. It is the same slow push plus the downbeat lift that was happening inside the piece — not the camera's original Live Photo motion from the day you shot it. If the original was a real Live Photo, the better version is already in your library and this is not it. What you get over a screenshot is the exact framing and the exact movement you were watching, on the one frame that mattered.

Direction is the other edge case: a frame that pushed in on screen is kept pushing in, one that pulled out is kept pulling out. That is deliberate — the saved motion is matched against what the stage was showing, so the file does not play against your memory of it.

The editor has three controls, and a floor of three frames

Before you keep anything, three things change, and that is the whole editor:

• the rhythm
• which frames stay
• their order

Rhythm is five pacings, each a real number rather than a mood word. Diary is the default at roughly 2.6 seconds per photo and 104 bpm. Unhurried is 3.2 s at 76 bpm. Long scroll is 2.3 s at 96 bpm. Night walk is the slowest at 3.6 s and 64 bpm. Staccato is the hard cut at 0.62 s and 128 bpm, the one built for bursts where the frames are nearly identical. Each pacing also carries its own floor and ceiling — Night walk runs between 14 and 160 seconds, Staccato between 4 and 45 — and Encore shows you the resulting length before you choose, so you are picking against a duration rather than a vibe.

Which frames stay opens the whole pool as a contact sheet. Tap to drop one; dropped frames stay visible, crossed out, so a mistake is a single tap to undo. You cannot go below three frames — at that floor the remaining cells simply stop responding, rather than letting you delete your way into a cut that cannot play.

Their order deserves precision, because it is not a free-for-all. Order always follows the original chronology of your library, never the order you tapped. Putting a frame back does not move it in time. What changes what plays is which frames are in the cut at all.

That is a deliberate trade. An app that assembles your memories will drift into becoming an editor, and the work belongs to the assembly, not to you.

What fails, and what you actually see

Keeping something out of the app has three failure modes, and Encore keeps them distinct because they point at three different places to go:

• No Photos permission. Fixable in Settings, and the app says so rather than shrugging.
• The piece is gone or empty. There is nothing to retry; it goes back to the shelf.
• Rendering failed. The only case where a retry button appears, because it is the only one where trying again can change the outcome.

One behaviour is worth knowing before you need it: the render survives the page. Closing the export screen while a film is rendering is a leave, not a cancel. The film finishes, lands in your Photos, and Encore tells you afterwards. Cancelling is a separate explicit button, and a cancelled export leaves nothing half-finished behind.

The caveat that shapes all of this: if you granted only selected-photo access, the app tells you plainly that its picks would be misleading, because rarity, density and "you never went back" all depend on seeing the whole library. Partial access is not a smaller Encore. It is a wrong one.

What Encore does differently

Every piece it assembles arrives with the fact it was assembled from — "the only time you went there in 2024", "42 shots that day", "forty shots in nine seconds". Checkable against your own library, never invented flattery, and never a claim that these were your best photos. Rarity works as a multiplier rather than a bonus, which is why one afternoon somewhere new can outrank a hundred frames from your living room. Coordinates are reduced to a coarse grid cell a few kilometres across before anything is compared, so the exact place you stood is neither kept nor transmitted.

The free/Pro split follows the same logic. Every way of picking, all five pacings and unlimited rewatches are free; the two gates are the film and the frame, because both put content outside the app. Face recognition — the feature with real consent weight — stays off until you switch it on, and one tap erases everything it found.

The decision

If you want the whole piece as something you can send, Pro buys a real render of that cut, made on your own phone. If you only ever want the one frame, the Live Photo is the smaller half of the same subscription, and it is honest about being a rendering of the movement rather than a recovery of the original.

Either way, watching stays free. The only question is whether anything is ever going to leave the app. If it is, Encore is built so that what you keep is what you were watching — the picking is explained first, and the piece people keep appearing in is the other thing it makes.