Freeware Tools: Express Animate 1.02

Create motion animations and add animations to your videos with Express Animate. Express Animate is free animation software that gives you the ability to animate shapes, text and imported images. Add video and image files to your movie canvas, objects can be moved, resized, rotated and more. Digital effects, such as, brightness, contrast, negative and more may be applied to objects, Key frames can be applied to each object and parameter . You can add text to your video project and create animated text and text bubbles and add audio tracks or record audio.

Express Animate is a lightweight and flexible animated clips creator that can load multimedia source files of all three types (graphic, video and audio). The program features plenty of built-in video effects, such as "Blur", "Sharpen" or "Hue".

Projects created with this program will require loading multimedia files. These can be either pictures, audio or videos. The resource is highly flexible and all common formats are supported. All inputs are placed in a single window and switching between the multimedia content used is supported.

Another interesting feature is the player that comes with the program. Although not an innovation by any standards, having this tool is crucial to loading the correct the files and checking or double-checking the adjustments made.

Some basic operations can be performed to the source files, such as adding text and resizing or rotating items. Simple or advanced shapes can be added, as well as dummy objects.

Express Animate comes equipped with 17 effects that can significantly alter and, contingent on the skills of users, improve the output video.

Among these very handy tools, one finds the classic “Black and White”, “Sepia” or “Negative” resources, as well as less-often used tweaks, such as “Temperature”, “Vignette” and “Tiles”.

All the effects can be applied to source files, in any order desired by users. Some adjustments will be quite dramatic (e.g. when selecting the “Two Tone” option), so users are advised to make good use of the Undo function.

When projects are finished, exported videos can take the form of most common video formats, including AVI, FLV, MOV, MPG or SWF. The program can also save to DVDs and upload content to YouTube.

To conclude, Express Animate is a highly intuitive and flexible tool for creating detailed animations. The abundance of video effects is a very nice feature which can really add a personal touch to the output multimedia files.