CrazyTalk is a useful tool that lets you create animation and add audio to facial images.
Overview
Digital animation technology has improved so much that it’s now possible to animate your own talking heads from your home PC. CrazyTalk promises to give you all the tools you need to import images and photographs before quickly applying mouth, head and eye movement to create realistic looking avatars and fun animations.
At first users might be a little skeptical about the value of CrazyTalk, Give it a try though and you'll be pleasantly surprised by the power of the utility. Granted, most peoples' initial efforts with the program will likely be limited to taking pictures of friends and adding famous song or movie audio clips to them just for kicks. These first experiments in CrazyTalk will be a little clunky and look far from realistic when you rely on the automatic lip-syncing functionality.
Features
Once you delve deeper into CrazyTalk's settings though, you'll start to realize that you can actually produce some impressive animations.
With enough tinkering you can customize everything in CrazyTalk, from the teeth in the character’s mouth to their facial movements and their range of movement. Best of all is the built-in timeline, which gives you complete control of the animation and sound, much as you would do in Flash, or a video-editing suite.
CrazyTalk offers alpha channel support, making it ideal for producing talking images to welcome visitors to your web site or in presentations. The simple-to-use export facilities also allow you to save to a range of formats as a media file, email attachment or a personalized greeting.
There are a few flaws with CrazyTalk that are a little frustrating though. The auto lip sync feature isn't all that impressive or accurate, for one, and there's no support for MP3 format audio. There also aren't all that many preset templates to work from, which might be bothersome to some users.
CrazyTalk requires some getting used to, but once you get the hang of it you'll be able to create unique facial animations.
Pros
Produces lifelike facial animation
Packed with features to help you improve your designs
Easy export to a range of formats
Cons
Auto lip-syncing is pretty poor
Doesn’t handle MP3 audio
Takes a bit of practice to get it right
