15-Minute Reviews :: Video Watermark Factory v1.0

Hello all and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is Video Watermark Factory version 1.0 by Sibental, Inc. – An application to apply watermarks to videos.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“Video Watermark Factory – a full-featured yet easy-to-use software that allows placing a digital watermark or logo or text over an existing video in the batch mode. Watermarks can be used for protection or adding comments to your movies. You may impose watermark on a whole video file or on a specified section of the movie. Brand Your Video With A Watermark!”

Quick Pros

• Easy-to-use interface
• Plenty of options including effects, resizing and more
• Can be used to transcode video to AVI, MPG, WMV or Real Media
• Video processing is fairly quick

Quick Cons

• Lacking drag and drop functionality
• No crop functionality
• Options for applying watermarks falls a bit short

Expansion

Upon launching the application, you are greeted by an easy to understand interface. The main window offers you access to most of the common functionality withing a click or two. The left side of the main window is the file listing window, giving you by default a thumbnail as well as some basic file information. Beneath that box is where you will find the buttons for adding files and folders as well as removing items from the list and clearing the entire list. To the right of the main window you will find a large preview window as well as buttons below for accessing resizing, splitting, effects, adding text and image watermarks as well as output options. All of the option screens are relatively easy to use as well. The one downfall that does drag down the usability of this application is the lack of drag and drop support for adding new files.

There are plenty of options outside just watermarking your files in the application. The most notable for functionality is the Effects window. The effects window offers you a very simple system for controlling the 18 different effects available (Which is quite a bit). There is the Effects Box for ordering the added effects, and on the Presets tab you can save your effects for later use. As well, you can resize and split your videos as well. For some reason there is no crop functionality.

An interesting side-effect of this application is that you can use this application not only for watermarking, effects, resizing and splitting/trimming, but it can be used as a transcoder in itself. You can output your videos as AVI (With your choice of settings and codecs), MPEG-1, MPEG-2, WMV and Real Media.

While the watermarking functionality is pretty powerful and offer plenty of options, it seems to fall a bit short. While there are plenty of positioning functionality, if you wish for your image or text to be auto-sized based on the video size and not on a preset sizing scheme, you are stuck with having to choose ‘Auto-Fit’, which works on a percentage. The downfall here is that the watermark is placed dead-center of the video instead of offering corners to place the image in. It may be a better solution to be able to do away with the Auto-fit mode altogether and then incorporate the scaling into both manual and tile mode.

During my testing of this application, I found that this application is surprisingly quick at being able to do its job. While it can’t be expected to be anywhere near the speed of an image watermark application, it pulls its weight quite well if you were to compare it on a frame-by-frame basis. For a video of 1:29 long, it took 0:53 to process it, with a few effects, a text and image watermark and to a different codec.

Final Verdict

While the application does still have a few rough edges to work on, the quality of the application for being a first-version is surprisingly good. For free, if you’re looking for a video watermarking application, or if you are even looking for some of the effects (such as brightness/etc) or transcoding, I would recommend picking this application up. As for paying $49 for this application, this price may be a bit high for casual use, if you do a few videos the price may be well worth it for some of the functionality in this program.

Posted by BladedThoth on Friday, January 04, 2008