CompuServe Thread

Chris, A detailed comparison of features I will leave to representatives of the products, ie. the users. I will say however, that morphing (or warping) is a complex technique or skill and that I think that someone with the interest in the output can make WinImages:Morph do more than ER, faster. -John

Chris, Sorry I didn't catch your message earlier… Comparing WinImages R3 to ER… very similar products, as far as morphing goes. WinImages offers some specific advantages, as does ER. WinImages is considerably easier to use; it's object oriented (as is ER) but does not require the use of an "onionskin" interface (although this is one way you can use it). We offer both onionskin and a "multiple windows" UI, which for most users is much, much friendlier than o-skin, which, by the way, we pioneered – as we did morphing, for that matter… we produced both the first morphing capability for PC's and the first morphing package for Windows. We've been at it a while. 🙂 WinImages offers several hundred special effects capabilities that ER can't do at all. Fire, lightning, auras, camera flares, rainbows, complete image processing and composition suites, and all of this can be combined (concurrently generated) with morphs using a powerful timeline interface. If you plan to render to low color (256-color, for instance), WinImages will do a better job… in fact, it's got what is very likely the best color reduction & dither technology in the industry. Both packages offer powerful layer controls, high speed (32-bit programs, both of them), object-oriented morphing, AVI and FLC output as well as a bunch of pro file formats. ER has some powerful "matteing" techniques you can't pull off with WinImages R3, which may or may not be useful to you; they've been used to good effect, for instance in "Stargate", where the armour on the baddies does some impressive folding… pretty sure I'm quoting the ER guys who said that was specifically one of the matte effects. Don't think you could do it as a straight morph, but then, I didn't get too long a look at it, like most effects, it went by _very_ fast. 🙂 You can see some of what WinImages can do by taking a quick look in DL8 of the ANVENA forum, where we have some AVI's and stills showing the morphing and special effects capabilties. Finally, WinImages is available for about 1/10th the price of ER. If you have questions, I'll be happy to answer them. Ben Williams for Black Belt Systems

Chris, I forgot to say: Quality of output between ER and WinImages should be exactly the same, based only on how well you set the packages up and the quality of the source images. WinImages being quite a bit easier to use, odds are you'll get higher quality, sooner, from it. Setup is almost nothing in WinImages – far less than ER. Ben