Tagged: Mac app

Create a quick video montage with Glimpses

I don’t do a whole lot of video work, but I do throw together quick videos for friends and family. Sometimes editing in iMovie, as simple as it is, is overkill for my needs. That’s why I appreciate simple little apps like Glimpses (formerly known as Briefly) from Eternal Storms Software.

Glimpses’ sole purpose is to quickly and easily create high-quality video montages—dozens, or even hundreds of photos flashing by for fractions of a second, set to music—like the one you see above. Now keep in mind that I paid no attention to the size, shape or resolution of the photos I chose—so don’t judge Glimpses by what you see in the video.

Working with Glimpses

Glimpses couldn’t be easier to use. You simply add a whole bunch of photos to the main window by selecting them from your Photos app collection, dragging from the Finder, or importing them from Flickr or Instagram. Once the photos are in the editing window, you can re-order them any way you wish, including: manually, by date, title or color (a very slick feature).

Glimpses main window

Once your photos are in order, you choose a soundtrack and set the duration you wish your photos to appear. You can choose anywhere from 0.1 to 4 seconds, or you can let Glimpses figure it out based on the length of your soundtrack. If you set the duration yourself, the soundtrack will fade out when all the photos have been displayed (like the video above). If your soundtrack is too short for the number of photos you have, you can add additional soundtracks, or loop it.

When you’re done, you simply export the video at the resolution you want, ranging from 240p all the way up to 4K. You can also have Glimpses remove any pillars and letter-boxing. But the coolest thing is that Glimpses recognizes faces, and moves the photos to keep them in the frame.

Shortcomings

I almost hesitate to call it shortcoming, but the one thing that bothered me was the inability to set any particular photo duration independently of the rest of them. For instance, it would be cool to have the first photo stay up for a second or two while leaving the rest of them set to half a second (or whatever).

You can get around this by placing duplicate photos in the editing window. So if you have your photo duration set to half a second, but you want the first one to stay on screen for five seconds, you simply have to have 10 copies of the photo set to appear in a row. It’s a bit of a pain, but not too difficult to work with. I’ve been in touch with Matthias Gansrigler at Eternal Storms and he tells me that he’s well aware of this limitation, and hopes to address it in a future release if possible.

In conclusion

I really love this little app, it works as advertised and doesn’t try to do too much. I’ve already used Glimpses to create a video greeting card for family, and a product intro video for a client. They were extremely pleased with the quality and speed with which I was able to put it together.

Glimpses requires Mac OS X Yosemite and costs just $24.99 (Mac App Store link). A 15-day demo version is available on the Glimpses product page. If you find iMovie to be overkill for producing montage videos, I highly recommend you give Glimpses a try.

Turn your photos into cool vector-pattern art with Vectoraster

Vectoraster 6
Vectoraster 6 is a fantastic little app for Mac OS X that creates vector-based artwork and patterns based on raster images. Simply put, it turns your photos into patterned vector art that you can then edit further in Adobe Illustrator.

The cool thing about this app is the “discoverability” of the app. Import an image and start playing with sliders and buttons, and you’ll soon find yourself spending a considerable amount of time coming up with ways you can use the app in your design work. That’s because Vectoraster shows you the results of your adjustments in real-time, in a single-window interface that’s quite easy to figure out.

Vectoraster 6 - sample

Vectoraster not only allows you to turn your images into vector halftone and line patterns, but it allows you to adjust the colors, hue, saturation, and density of the patterns as well. A host of other tools are also available that allow you to customize the results in almost any way you could need.

Once you’re done, you can export to vector format as an EPS or PDF, or a JPG, PNG or TIFF file if you prefer. And if you have a group of images you wish to apply the same effects to, there’s batch processing available.

The use case for this app is endless. For instance, I had a rather small 5×7 image of my son that I wanted to enlarge to hang on the wall – but I didn’t want a simple photo enlargement. So I ran it through Vectoraster and used the Character/Text point shape option to have the letters of his name create the entire photo. Not only was it a cool piece of art, but because it was vector, I could size it to whatever I wished.

Here are some more screenshots to give you an idea of how the app can help you:

Vectoraster6_color_gradient

Vectoraster 6 text raster

Vectoraster6 wavy line raster

Vectoraster is a bit difficult to explain, but the video below should give you some idea of what you can do with Vectoraster.

Vectoraster is one of those apps that you won’t use daily, but one that you’re glad you have when you want to spice-up an image in a design piece.

Vectoraster 6 requires an Intel-based Mac running OS X 10.7.5 or later, and supports Full Screen mode. The full version costs $32, and upgrades are available for $12. A free demo is available so you can check it out for yourself.