About four months ago I got contacted to see if I wanted to review a product called FotoMagico. I get lots of these offers, but my to-do list is so long that I turn most of them down. I quickly checked out the web site to see what this product was about and was immediately intrigued. Fast forward to today when I finally got time to review this product and I’m now kicking myself for not doing it out sooner!
In short, FotoMagico is a very inexpensive, yet easy and fun to use app for generating videos of your photos and videos with great transitions, music and more. Sure, you’ve seen lots of apps like this, but if you are like me most have failed to meet your expectations. Of course web sites like Animoto showed great promise and were super popular, but it was absurdly priced so why bother right?
WARNING: This is a Mac OS X product only. It will not run on Windows! (Don’t feel bad Windows users, QImage doesn’t run on OS X – much to the frustration of Mac users <g>).
User Interface Tour
The user interface is clean and simple with nice integration with both the files on your drive as well as your libraries in iPhoto, Lightroom and Aperture. You just select your images and drag and drop them onto the storyboard.
Once you have your files dropped you can create an instant slideshow and be done – zero work on your part – or you can use the storyboard or timeline to customize your presentation.
The Timeline is powerful so you can perform advanced customizations with text that appears on demand.
You can even add videos as well as photos, and you can choose for auto advancement of your slides or click to navigate (on supported platforms).
You can even have teleprompter notes to display on a second display or beamer to provide your own words during a live presentation.
New for 4.2 - Masks and Opacity Control!
FotoMagico Demo
Here’s a demo that the folks at Boinx wanted me to show you so you can see what’s possible after you master this product:
and here’s my first video (rated PG) that I created using low res images off my people portfolio (NSFW) with very little effort:
I did this without reading any manuals or any help, and now that I've done it once I could easily recreate a video like this with new content in less than 10 minutes. There is an error at the end with the audio that could have been prevented with a feature that exists in FotoMagico to adjust the slide timing based on the length of the audio, but I forgot to use that before publishing my video.
What’s New in 4.2
If you’ve already been using this cool product, then you might be curious to know what’s new in version 4. Here’s a little video that tells you all about it (which new users might find useful as well):
Here’s also what’s new in 4.2:
Click here to see more videos on some of the new enhancements like the splitscreen effect, picture in picture, the spotlight effect and more.
Conclusion
I hate video because it’s too time consuming and a pain in ass to edit, but this changes my view a little bit. FotoMagico was super easy and fun to use so I quickly became addicted to video experimentations! I was very satisfied with the results that didn’t take me long to build (excluding time wasted experimenting just for fun). It was also super easy to build output videos for YouTube, Vimeo, DVD, and iOS devices with a click of a button. In short, all software should be this be fun and simple.
Oh, and in case you are wondering – in the two hours I played around with FotoMagico on my 3 year old MacBook Pro, it didn’t crash or hang once. 8GB was plenty and the performance on newer systems should be even better!
Now you are no longer limited to the crappy slideshows that Lightroom creates nor do you have a reason (if you have a Mac) to not make videos of your work. This is a really cool app that I’m very excited about and highly recommend it! If you are a wedding or event photographer, then you'll really love it as its so much easier and faster than anything I’ve used!
To learn more or get A 5 day free trial visit boinx.com here. Don’t forget to come back here to get a discount on your order using the link below!
Special Offer – Save 10%
Click here to get your 10% discount (it should appear something like what you see below):
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Disclosure
If you make a purchase using links found in this article, I may make a commission. It doesn’t cost you a penny more, but it does help to support future articles like this. I also was provided a copy of this product to review for the purpose of bringing this article to you.
3 comments:
One thing to neglected to discuss is the fact that you'll also need to purchase the rights to music for use with your slideshows. While I agree the animoto more expensive than I'd like, they do provide a pretty decent selection of music as part of their service.
I like the last vdo MAP demo. Do you have this tutorial ?
and how to edit sound level in 3 layers.
Thank you
Sorry, I don't have the tutorial but they have more videos on the site to help you out. Their support seemed pretty friendly too so you could ask them directly.
Good luck,
Ron
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