Animation? You'd better believe it!

…and batch processing, too.

When we say that, we mean: these effects can be applied to sequences, or streams, of individual images or to unified animation files, such as AVI files.

Not only can you simply apply the effects to frame after frame, but you have exquisite control over their various settings (as many as 39 settings per effect) while doing so, via the program's timeline. For instance, here is a dialog that shows you eleven settings you can control in an animated fashion for just one effect, lightning:

The trend buttons that sit beside each of the operator settings are one way to directly access trend dialogs that uniquely set that specific effect control over time, as seen here:

There are other ways to control these values as well. For instance, you can set the effect up with one group of settings, drag it into the timeline from the toolbar, then set it up with a completely different group of settings, drag that into another location on the timeline, and the settings will smoothly change from the first position to the second, thus morphing (linear or splined tweening, your choice, per setting) all of the changed controls.

You can drag as many copies of differently set operators in as you like, which allows you to morph between arbitrarily different groups of settings repeatedly. This approach provides an enormous degree of flexibility and power right at your fingertips.

But that's not all there is to animation in WinImages. In addition to the above effect extravaganza, all of the area selection tools and modifiers you see at the left can be be applied to motion streams as well.

This means that effects, with their settings changing to any degree as we described above, can also travel and morph in position and shape, along a motion stream - for instance, you do something as FX-like as make fire burn on someone's head as they walk, bouncing up and down, etc., or you can do something more vanilla, like make an area of increased contrast track one (or more) areas of a motion stream. You can do more than one effect at a time, just as you can do more than one area.

Animation Example

We'll use this image, and apply some lightning to it:

The subject for our effect animation

Here's the timeline that created the animation shown below

In the above timeline, we've set up the lightning effect in level one. All that had to be done here was set up the settings in the operator dialog, and then drag the icon from the toolbar into the timeline. The red arrow means that the effect applies in all frames it covers - that's the default when you drag an operation into the timeline. You can adjust the arrow, and hence the number of frames affected, just by dragging its tip.

Next we want to control the location of the lightning effects.

We placed four area selections in level one. Each of these is a freehand line that was drawn from the "electrode" at the top to one of the four lower points. We did the left one first, then others, working from left to right.

You will observe that these area selections also have arrows, blue ones. These point to the next area selection. This means that each area selection is to change from one area, where the arrow starts, to the frame that the arrow points to, smoothly over the frames that the arrow covers. This is automatic. You can make the changes linear, or splined, two very different ways of interpolating areas.

Then, in level two of the timeline, we've added two Asterize effects to act as "sparks." They each have an elliptical area selection to define where they occur, but as you can see, there are no arrows at all. This means that the effects and the area selections only apply to those specific frames. They don't affect the image where the frames in the timeline are blank.

Because the operations in level two are in the same frames that the area selections in level one specify the "hits" to the points, and because the elliptical area selections were made at the tips of the two bottom points, the sparks are perfectly timed and perfectly located in the animation. It's really easy to do this kind of co-ordinated effect application. This timeline took about 45 seconds to build, and we had our resulting animation complete and running about 10 seconds after that.

Observe how the lightning travels along the paths
chosen by the area selections, and how the sparks fly at
the precise time the lightning hits the points at the base.

WinImages isn't limited to a motion stream. It can animate still images as we show above, and you can simply feed it a "batch" of images to be worked upon, and apply effects to them in bunches - perhaps just to adjust color balance, or to apply a watermark to identify the batch of images as yours - imagine applying "Copyright © John Doe 2002" on 250 images at once, as easy as 1, 2, 3. In letters made of gold foil, with a transparent fabric backdrop!

But remember, this is only the most limited sort of overview of what WinImages can do as far as animation goes. The software is so flexible and so powerful that we're sure you'll find your own unique uses for it. Everyone seems to!