Playing with Fantamorph...

[Gerlinde]

I always wanted to try Fantamorph and thanks to Cheryl's excellent instructions, I was able to do a little morph sequence in no time. I did not bother to cut out my subject, I only sized the pictures ruffly using your 1024 x 768 preset, see here
Abrosoft has added a watermark to the tryout version , but it is not too obtrusive. This is just a quick and dirty.... but here is it ( with a sound track from the Muvipix library ):

http://share.shutterfly.com/action/welcome?sid=0IcMmTRuxaMWGb

[Dave McElderry]

That's pretty cool. This is just a personal preference, but I think I prefer a few seconds of pause after each morph, allowing me to get a better look at the person at that moment in time before moving to the next. Of course that would depend on the particular context. Nonetheless, for something that you didn't put a lot of time into that's impressive.

[momoffduty]

Great job Gerlinde! That is a lot of photos you morphed.

[Chuck Engels]

Wow, that was a great job of morphing Gerlinde !!

[Gerlinde]

Thank you all for your nice comments!

Dave, you have a point, it would be nice to pause between each morph. But I think it would make the whole sequence to long. It all depends probably on the amount of pictures you are using.

Cheryl, I'm actually planing to include a couple more pictures. It was a very quick and suprisingly easy process. I used Photoshop to get all the pictures in portrait oriantation and all the heads into the aproximate same size. The key is to name all the photos so they stay in the right order.

In Fantamorph I started with the first 2 pictures, added 4 dots for the eyes, 3 dots for the nose and 7 dots around the mouth, 1 on the chin. After that it was only a matter of importing the 2nd image for the next sequence and adjusting the dots on the new image. I'm sure there is probably a better way of doing that, but it worked for me and I got it done in no time.

The bigger problem was how to export the final product, I'm still not completely clear on what is the best way to do that.

Chuck, it was a lot of fun!

[Dave McElderry]

Dave, you have a point, it would be nice to pause between each morph. But I think it would make the whole sequence to long. It all depends probably on the amount of pictures you are using.

Oh my, yes! In your particular case especially. it would have made the sequence 2 to 3 times its present length. If I was working with something of that length I'd likely have done it the way you did. When I made that comment I was particularly thinking of the little project of 9 images of mine that Cheryl helped with.

[momoffduty]

Gerlinde, when you bring in the first 2 photos go to Add Ons>Face Locator. In the pop up panel there will be about 50 dots placed on the face. When you adjust one the rest of the group will follow. For instance there are about 5 for the ears in a group, 15 around the face, etc. After adjust APPLY ALL for the 2 photos. When you bring in additional photos bring up the Face Locator but BE SURE to APPLY ONE so the ones you did previously are not changed.

I end up with about 80+ for each face features, around the cut out, the shirt neckline, and the hair style for girls.

For exporting you can select AVI. For transparency check box the 32 bit. For an image sequence to retain transparency export as a JPG sequence and in the pop up save box you can change to TIFF. Again, select 32 bit.

There are backgrounds in Fantamorph too if you don't want transparency.

[Gerlinde]

Cheryl, thank you for the additional pointers. I will definately try the face locator, that seems like a big time saver.
The export to avi option is actually causing me the headache. Once you go that route, you have to choose what codec/ compressor you want to use.

[momoffduty]

I have only exported an uncompressed AVI and use in PrPro or any editor. I've never needed to export a compressed AVI and checked with my version's help. You can only export a codec that is on your computer which is odd because even in the compressed export my only option is AVI. I have tons of options in the Adobe Media Encoder so wouldn't these codecs be installed?

[Gerlinde]

I may not have explained that right. You put a checkmark on the compressed avi option and export, now a new window pops up and you see all the codecs that are installed on your computer. Avi is only the container and you can choose any codec available. On the Fantamorph site they tell you to use DIVx codec and it actually worked pretty good. But I decided to add a sound track and tried to import that file into PRE 11. Of course this did not work ( I really don't know why I every year give some more money to Adobe ). Fortunately the file imported without a problem into Magix MEP.
I also tried to export as a image sequence, but I ended up with too many frames per picture. I have to spend some more time to figure that out.

[momoffduty]

If you are going to use the file in an editor then use uncompressed AVI. I think the compression settings are for someone using Fanta's BGs and exporting for direct upload to the web.

[_Paz_]

G,

Fantamorph is easy, isn't it?

Cute kid! He and his family are going to love this.

Paz