PixFlip Animator

Image files are used to build textures, ads, and basically every visual elements that grabs your attention. These can also be bundled in a slideshow to help you with presentations, or simply to continuously play on terminals for product display. In this regard, PixFlip Animator lets you create a movie clip out of multiple pictures, with different customization options.

It takes only a little while before you get to check out the set of features, with the installer taking little time. However, it’s best to make sure that .NET Framework is installed on your PC for things to work out.

The visual design isn’t much to look at, but the simplicity lets you quickly get the hang of things, without too much effort. As mentioned above, you get to work with pictures, but loading them is only done through multiple selection in a browse dialog, because dragging them over the main window has no effect, nor can you target a folder for its content.

Once loaded, pictures appear in a list, with the possibility to scroll through them for a bigger preview. Any enhancements need to be made before loading pictures, because the application doesn’t come with any visual related editing options. It would have been useful to at least be able to add captions.

The result consists of an AVI files which plays at a custom pace. This is determined by the rate you need to specify, representing the number of slides to show per second. Playback controls let you preview before building the actual clip.

When choosing to export as AVI, a few more options become available. For instance, the path can be set, as well as an audio file to play along with the clip. The number of frames per second needs to be specified again, because original configurations are discarded. Just before the process starts, you can select a compressor, which in the end determines video quality.

Bottom line is that there are multiple methods to build slideshows and presentations. PixFlip Animator can be used if you need to quickly assemble one, but practicality has a lot to suffer because of the lack of any editing options, or at least possibility to add text overlay for explanations, or as watermark.