hello and welcome to this honest review of Vid Toon and this will be excruciatingly honest
so it's a very good price it's 37 and no doubt you might be able to get it cheaper still and it's
used to make animated explainer videos or animated videos but is it any good well i'm going to talk
about that in this video so before we go into the review i just want to show you something i knocked
up using the software it's just a 10 second little video for a made up company called ninja travel
but i just want to show you what's possible with the software
to be as fair as i can feeling tired and need a vacation get away with ninja travel this summer
so first of all when you purchase it you will download a zip file is quite a
big zip file it's about 670 megabytes but you download that and then when you decompress it
like I've done here you can pretty much run it straight away you notice you've got unity
stuff well it's a unity application so you don't need to install it you just run it
straight away as it is so i click on Vid Toon or double click on Vid Toon and it starts to load
so here it is and we can change the screen resolution i'm gonna go for
the highest here i'm gonna i've never changed the graphics quality i'll leave it at ultra
and i'm gonna put it on here because i'm using two monitors at the moment so i'm going to click play
so here we see vidtune loading so you need to put in your email address that you purchased it with
done
you can create or load a new project so i'm gonna
create a project called demo and here we are we've got our timeline we've got our sort of assets and
we just pull them in it's very simple so we've got our three layers here and this is the problem with
this application can be as good as you want but if you've only got three layers you are really really
limited so we're gonna add a background and we just drag it in and we put it on this timeline and
it's annoying that it always appears small so you drag on this red icon to make it bigger so i want
it to be the full size so i'm going to put it up there and i'm going to drag this down it's just
a very official government looking background so i can move this along and again i can drag it out
to the full 10 seconds i can add more time here and i can take it away here and i can play here
i can pause stop etc stopping it puts it back to the beginning so now i probably want a character
and there's loads of characters there's quite a lot here loads of characters ninjas boxes
they're alphabetical which is useful you can search for them
and it doesn't just search by the first part it searches for bits within the string which
is useful one of my criticisms and these types of software is it's very difficult to search for
things but you can search for things so loads i can scroll through you know you do get lots and
lots of characters let's have a senior businessman he can be a senator so let's put him here and he's
already doing an action so i'm going to put him down here he seems to be dancing about i can
make him bigger or smaller here and again i can move him out if and now if i play this we just
see he's moving he's doing his thing and he's disappeared because i haven't dragged this out
so i'm going to drag it out to here stop it and there we are if i want to change his behavior
i click on him or click on the timeline i go up here to settings and i can change his start time
duration i can flip him horizontally so yep he's facing the other way let's take that off and i can
change his behavior and i got quite a lot of behaviors here let's have him flying with balloons
i can put him on a loop i can certainly appears and disappears
and i can do a moving from a to b and i can duplicate i don't really know what duplicate does
duplicate doesn't really make much sense to me so this would be a really boring animation
so i'm gonna set him from an a to b so i'm gonna click on him here
and we're going to do some a to b move so i need to check this for a to b
so i move this to where i want it to be so i'm going to move it here and now let's play
it so he moves from a to b now notice he seems to be dropping down for some reason
so let's do a select him again now it's really odd because
the flag here even if i have the bottom part
of the flag is the lowest part he does seem to be moving off screen so i'm going to put him
all the way up here and i'm going to put him there let's see what happens now
so that's a bit rubbish isn't it so he doesn't actually go to where you want him to go
he carries on on his path that he was on before so it's almost like we need to get
rid of this move a to b take it off try again let's try move a to b it's where it was before
so what we need to do is i've never had to do this
before we have to sort of clear it and start it again and then
i'm going to add in a few more seconds and i'm just going to extend this
i have to scroll along here okay so i have there's no there doesn't need to be any control bar here
uh this would be my duplicated one so i'm going to
i'm going to delete that so i seem to have some duplicated one that i don't want so i'm going to
now i can sort of move along this way right so i need to go all the way to here to get rid of it
now let's try that again stop start so that's what i'd expect to happen i put the flag there at 10
and of course he's going to disappear so i'll just make him go along here just make it so it's even
with the background he should stop and just hang about for a second or two
no he just goes off so the animation does look good it's a bit of a hassle to put together
it it's not very intuitive at all but here and and me using it for a second or third time i'm
finding new things out all the time because it's so unintuitive but one background one
character it doesn't really make an animation so we might want to add another one in
got another character but he disappears so i'm going to select the character i'm going to
make him go for the same amount of time let's see what happens
so he's there he's permanent let's do some animating of him
let's have a zoom in he zooms in and he's
let's make him for sale so he pops up he's for sale the other man floats away
we go off the page that's that's i'm gonna export just gonna save as output one
okay so it's playing on the full screen and it's doing that as it exports and you know
it looks really good it looks like a really good video still seems to be going for some reason
i'm not sure where the video ends and it's stopped let's see if that output has worked
here we go output one oh we've got a file now saved as an mp4
so that looks really good so that looks like a really good animation it's low
file size it's exported 720 there doesn't seem to be any options to export the high resolution
we can add music in i don't know what music one is
no idea what that was because i've got my mic plugged in so i can't hear it
but again or we can pull it down it doesn't seem to have worked ah there we are
we can do some text-to-speech recording so we can if i click here it doesn't seem to work
no that doesn't work if i click here
ah i can add some text your text goes here
this is so unintuitive right i'm gonna have to go to settings aren't i right
test text test text let's make it bigger
oh can't seem to make it bigger let's put it up there let's watch this with the music
so you can't really change backgrounds have to swap them out so let's swap them out like this
see what happens here ah okay
it's a very very difficult to use and very unintuitive piece of software
it will do the job it will get it done you really need a lot of patience for this
i mean like i say you've got lots of characters gallery you can clearly import your own
images if you want you've got loads of characters it has promise but it just seems a little
frustrating and unintuitive and yeah we i mean we got loads of backgrounds as well to put together
something that's not just a few seconds would be really difficult i think really difficult
so that's my review cheap can do the job but no doubt is going to leave you frustrated thank you