14 DAY TRIAL // Creating effects for text lines, images and even videos is pretty easy nowadays. It generally depends on your creativity and the range of options the software is garnished with. Image editing has taken a huge leap and passed to creating video from still pictures. That was already possible with the .gif format, but they are not as elaborate to fit our needs.
If you come to think of it, it was inevitable, as a video is made up of frames that are nothing else but short instances. If you can decompose a movie into pictures (and there is a myriad of softwares that are able to do that) why not make a movie from your own pictures?
Atani is designed primarily for creating AVI and GIF files from regular pictures. It is developed by Alex and Alex Soft, and the installation file will take only 1.20MB of your hard disk space. The tested version brings some small changes in the program, such as the new possibilities of previewing the frames, the Environment options and the setting of transparent color for any frame (previous versions supported this feature only for creating animated GIF files).
The preview will ease the work if you have large quantities of frames (e.g. more than 150). The Environment options contains six submenus gathered together that allow the user to make all the settings for the resulting file at once. Thus in the Main tab you can set the width and height of the movie, set the extension (.avi or .gif), fix the framerate for both .avi and .gif and make the color settings (left and right panel, preview back, background frame and AVI).
In Alpha-Blending (allows transparency effects) the user can set the background color and the number of frames. The Add Text tab lets you define the name of the text to add (flying text and creeping line) and the number of frames to show (a frame corresponds to a letter in this case).
The software will allow you to add frames from different file formats (.bmp, .ico, .jpg, .gif, .png and .jpeg) and the maximum number of frames for preview. Capture gives access to making the capturing options: number of frames, the framerate (in milliseconds), the shape of the capture after run and the extension to be saved under.
The interface of the software is easy to use and even a beginner will be able to manage the software with no problems. All there is to creating your own AVI video file or animated GIF is to add the frames, which are the pictures you have stored on your computer.
When you want to create a new project, the Project Options window will popup. Here you have to set the width and height of the file (.avi or .gif) and the rate (in milliseconds). Now start adding pictures using the Add Frames button (right under New Project or in Edit menu or just use the Ctrl+A keyboard shortcut).
Add as many frames as you want and proceed to applying effects on them. There are four different categories the user can choose from: Artistic, Distort, Mode and Stylize. The poorest of them contains only eight effects and is the Stylize category. You can create marble, posterize, solorize, noise, spatial, split light, trace and wind effects to the desired frame.
The richest of them is definitely the Distort section (16 different choices), but the changes you can choose from here are not so creative and aesthetic as you might think. The options in here include antialias, gauss blur, moire, water, spherize, ribbon, shadow, swirl, warp, etc.
In Mode category, the user can play with the colors of the frame and set the contrast, grayscale the image, fiddle with the lightness, adjust the HLS (hue, lightness and saturation), make the RGB adjustments (settings for the red, green, blue color model), etc.
In the final stage of your work you can play the animation to see how it looks like and, if you are satisfied, all you have to do is generate the file and save it on your computer.
The Good
You can make video files from your own pictures. The software allows you to apply a pretty large number of effects.
The user can add text to the AVI or GIF file in order to customize the results.
The Bad
The software has a rather high price for the features it brings ($35.95).
The Truth
The only major problem with creating a video from images is that the pictures do not have the same size. The software has the option of resizing the pictures, so that all of them have the same dimension.
The effects available are pretty wild, but I would have liked to have the possibility of importing new effects, or create my own.
All in all, the software is worth playing with. Although the software is a shareware ($39.95) I did not bumped into any restrictions. All I could find is that ?3.9 version is free to try, but if you are going to use this program constantly, you must buy it?.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
