15-Minute Reviews :: VidMorph v1.2.0.49

Hello all and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is VidMorph version 1.2.0.49 by GeoVid – An application to create videos of morphing objects from images.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“VidMorph is funny software for morphing your pictures. This allows you import your photo or any other picture into another picture. You can morph various pictures such as, face or image of your friends, family, pets, etc. together. VidMorph lets you create, crop and resize the pictures, and save it into popular media format: avi, wmv, flv, swf.

You will able to see your morphed video before transforming with preview screen. You can make cheerful animation for a couple minutes.

Let your friends to be enjoyed together with you.You can create different projects – showing how people look as they grow up, changing people into animals and monsters, showing animated product changes, connecting different ‘takes’ of film and video – are possible with VidMorph.”

Quick Pros

• Interface is relatively simple – Not much to it
• Grid system is a lot easier than other systems
• Assortment of output options including WMV, FLV/SWF, 3GP, MP4 and AVI

Quick Cons

• Lack of any help or tips for improving morphs
• No undo functionality & Grid system, while easy, does not allow for great animations and marginal quality
• Clicking Stop while recording morph crashes application
• Only morph between two pictures at a time

Expansion

The interface with this application is relatively easy to use. When you launch the application, you are greeted by a wizard-like interface; The next three steps are for loading the images you want to morph between. Once you have completed picking the images you want, you then go into the main window. Within the main window you have some basic buttons along the top and bottom of the window, and then in the center of the window is the two images side-by-side. You will quickly see in the images there is a grid-like window. This is where you control your morph. Moving the points around in this application is surprisingly easy – The difficult part of this application is knowing good places to put the points.

Having used morphing products in the past, the grid-style system is easier for people new to morphs than the direct-point or point/connector systems. It was actually very easy to get a decent quality morph going by moving the points over critical items such as eyes, ears, nose, mouth, chin and so forth. Not able to find any button to add more grid lines, the helpfile was the next to check out. When I clicked on Contents in the Help menu, it brings you to this website page to surprisingly find no help whatsoever and instead greeted by the product information page. There is no tips on how to make a good morph, how to add lines; Nothing. For someone new to morphing, this could be very daunting/intimidating and without a bit of knowledge it is hard to create a good morph. Through luck, right-clicking on the image brings up a pop-up in which now you can add or remove lines. The issue here is learning how to add lines to the right place; A bit tricky, you have to add the lines by highlighting the line to the left or top of where you want to add a line (ensuring it highlights in red) and then adding the line via the right-click menu.

While the grid system does ease the difficulty of diving into a morphing program, using a grid system also brings its own issues. Even by adding more lines, you will find that this system is not as good to get tight detail control as a point system would be; Eyes are going to look a little funny at times, the hairline may move awkwardly and so forth.

The number of output formats is good. WMV, FLV/SWF, 3GP, MP4 and AVI are all included, and a decent amount of control of the output. This is handy for offering an assortment of distribution methods.

The other issue had was that when doing a few test morphs, clicking Stop during processing caused the application to crash, losing all of my points. The application did it twice, so make sure you save before running if you plan on clicking ‘Stop’.

(One quick note; ‘Left Grop’ and ‘Right Grop’ should be left and right ‘Crop’, in the Actions menu.)

Sample

Final Verdict

With a lack of any sort of helpfile or tutorial, this application may be awkward for new people to morphing. While it is simple to get going, the grid system does have its limitations in quality. For free, it may be a good one to dabble in for trying out morphing, but I would seriously recommend trying out something a little more powerful that has some tutorials. As for paying $29.95, I would have difficulties recommending this title with the lack of any help as well as the lack of power with this tool. A freeware alternative with more features would be Sqirlz Morph.

Posted by BladedThoth on Thursday, January 10, 2008