Animated Sketches

fair
key review info
application features
  • Ease of use
  • (2 more, see all...)

Video manipulation has come a long way lately. It is getting more difficult to spot a fake from the untouched one. If layers are an amazing thing for images, imagine what these can do for videos. I've seen some amazing samples of video layering and I have to admit that it makes you think of all the possibilities.

Movie industry has benefited the most from video technology as effects are made more plausible than ever, and in some cases, there have been made completely digital movies, with no actors or sets to shoot on. Of course there are some glitches here and there, but the output results are truly amazing.

Well, if video can be manipulated into serious stuff, why not try to make it fun? You know the cartoon-like image effect? What if it was moving? The result would be an animated cartoon, made from a real movie.

As the Internet is a never-ending database of everything, recently I bumped into a very easy to use application designed to transform your AVI videos into moving cartoons. The app will add a cartoon-like effect over the image, making it look like quite funny.

Animation from Movie is a $29.95 demo designed to transform your videos, regardless of their size, into animation sketches. Actually the name says it all. The only limitation of the evaluation version is placing a watermark on the output result. Other than this there is absolutely no restriction in using the program.

The looks have nothing special, in fact they as simple as can be. You have the video window on the left part of the application screen and the settings are displayed in the right. It looks like there are some issues with it because when adding a movie to transform, there is no visible change. Only when pressing "Play Movie" or "Play Animation" buttons you'll notice a change in the sense that the video will start playing.

There are no configuration settings for the application and the only changes available are video related. Not too many of them either and I can't imagine a user having trouble with them. Video options permit the user adjusting the animated sketch by making it darker or lighter (the result consists in more or less lines of the moving drawing) or making it show more or fewer details. This is all the configuration you can make to the video.

An additional option lets you set the number of frames of the video to be converted. The user can set the application to apply the drawing effect on a specific number of frames. Unfortunately there is no preview and you will have to guess what part of the video stops at a certain frame or use an additional tool for getting this information.

Output options do not resume to applying drawing lines over the original video and you can save the result either in AVI or SWF format. For SWF there is absolutely no additional option, just set SWF output location and then proceed to recording. If you want to transform only a certain part of the video, set the start and end frames in the appropriate box.

Saving the movie as AVI offers far more options. The application gives you the chance to choose the compression encoder from a drop down list. The most popular and appreciated ones (DivX and XviD) are available and can be configured to make the best compromise between quality and size of the output.

A more expensive option for the disk is saving the file uncompressed, but first of all make sure that you have at least a couple of GB free on the disk. If you feel that XviD and DivX are too complicated to configure take a shot at Microsoft Video 1 or RLE compressors which provide minimum and easy configuration options.

As simple as it is the application is not without errors and it happened more than once to get an error screen displayed. And coincidence made this happen each time I tried to use DivX (version 5.0.5) codec for compression.

Animation from Movie does a good job, provided that the video you feed it is suitable for making an animated sketch out of it. However, there are serious lacks in what concerns the options. There is no preview window and it is quite difficult to apply the drawing effect only on a certain part of the video.

The Good

The application is extremely easy to use. The user actually makes no effort in creating the cartoon file. You can save the result either in AVI format (a bunch of video codecs will assists in compressing the video file) or in SWF if you want to place it in a web page.

As soon as you load the AVI video you can preview the animation that can be created from it.

The Bad

There are extremely few options to configure. During our testing, the application could not carry out a job - saving the file in uncompressed AVI caused the software to crash each time at about half way.

Users do not have an easy way to set up the frame interval to be animated as there is no preview window.

Trying out DivX codec caused an error and the application again, could not carry out the job.

The Truth

Considering the above mentioned, I think the price is maladjusted to the features of the program. For $30 I would have expected a bit more flexibility and features, but all you can do is adjust a couple of animation parameters (darker/lighter and more/fewer details).

Here are some snapshots of the application in action:

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user interface 3
features 2
ease of use 4
pricing / value 2


final rating 2
Editor's review
fair
 
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