Movie Cartoonizer

Multimedia is an important part of modern entertainment, with the possibility to create a clip out of just about anything. What’s more, editing tools have also come a long way, and it’s easier than ever to combine clips, or add various effects. For instance, Movie Cartoonizer lets you play with colors and other settings to turn any video into a cartoon.

Before rushing to turn videos into their cartoon correspondents, you need to make sure that .NET Framework is installed on the computer you want to use it on. File support is pretty decent, with the possibility to load formats like AVI, MOV, MPG, MPEG, WMV, MP4, ASF, and RM, but also record webcam activity through a built-in component.

Unfortunately, the interface isn’t quite the friendliest place in the world, and you need to spend some time to get your head around the ambiguous design. There are three steps to the whole operation, which are not difficult to use and understand, but the lack of any delimiters makes it a bit confusing at first.

It’s best to work with short clips, or you can end up waiting more than actually editing. This is because the application decomposes the video in a custom number of frames per second, while the build process is also done frame by frame. In other words, after applying an effect to a frame, you add it as part of the resulting movie, and so on.

There’s a preview area that loops playback so you get an idea what you get in the end. Luckily, the scale is tipped a bit in the application’s favor by the simplicity of editing, and the surprising diversity that can be obtained. Simply adjusting a smoothness and details slider changes everything.

The output is always a GIF animation, with the possibility to set resolution to a custom set of values. The application lets you split, merge, or recolor existing animations in case you missed something or got a few frames wrong.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that Movie Cartoonizer manages to live up to expectations, by providing a neat result, but not without a struggle. The interface leaves more to be desired, while processing of each frame can take some time, but the final product makes it worth at least a try.