News :: 15MR: PhotoToFilm

Welcome to our next installment of 15MR! With decent response yesterday and an interesting app today, called PhotoToFilm.

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“PhotoToFilm is the perfect companion for everyone who uses a digital camera. Thanks to PhotoToFilm you can easily make small movies out of your pictures and compress them (ie : using DivX) in order to distribute your production to your friends and relative. PhotoToFilm allows you to add professional looking effects in a few clicks and makes video authoring a game.”

Quick Pros

• Easy to use. The simple one-page design is nice, and is very to use
• Great alternative to full-blown video publishing applications
• Quick Flash tutorial available for use for those who need a little extra guidance
• Inclusion of MP3 track simpler than other applications
• Three options make a very nice effect
• Ability to reorganize a plus
• Proper use of ‘Add Files’ nice
• Video preview great idea
• Drag-n-drop functionality

Quick Cons

• It is not fully-functional – Offers To-DVD and Burn and then redirects you to the website for purchase of another program. States it’s free, but really only evaluation version
• Lack of control on “On Video Text Insertion”—It’s either there or not. No options
• Text is not nice looking for the “On Video Text Insertion”—See above
• Should allow for other resolutions so that you can place on a website as well
• It would be nice if you could set options for each image as well: IE:- ms per image; disable dynamic pictures per image, etc. Be simple with a right-click menu and maintain ease of use
• No Add Folder or recursive folder abilities

Expansion

Not much to expand on. It is a great little application. Quality of the video is a little low, and the functionality is a little low, but its nice for what it does. My pet peeve is that it is not fully-functional; you have to use two applications to use all the features. Granted, for free and for $9.99 normally, I guess I can’t complain. The built-in functionality would be nice, but not worth the additional $75 USD for both for integration with this application. There are freeware versions available that do the same thing (just no integration, unfortunately—Does the author of this little app get a kickback from VSO Software, I wonder.) My pet peeve is that it makes is sound like its free, you get there, and they are watermark-limited evaluations.

Final Verdict

If you have any plans of turning images into a video slideshow, this app is for you. For free, everyone who has or will have the need should pick it up and a freeware avi-to-dvd application. I would likely pay the affordable $9.99 as well if I had the need for it, and I definately would recommend it for purchase by my clients, if I did not find a similar freeware version. $9.99 does make this very alluring for anyone you know who may need this who has no intention on paying for the full video production suites or learning them for that matter. If they made the improvements to the cons, I would be willing to pay $15-$20 for it. Include the recording features, and I would be around $25-$30.

Posted by BladedThoth on Monday, January 29, 2007