With a name like Stupeflix, you’ve got to be wondering what’s up with this site. What the site does is provide you with a graphical interface that allows you to create your own slide show videos, complete with soundtracks, text overlays, and image legends. What makes the site a real winner is that it’s not just easy to create these things, but you have all the freedom in the world to create your video.
When you load up the Stupeflix editor, you can either upload photos, or just pasted in a bunch of URLs to images you want to use. You seperate the images into groups, giving them each their own caption. You can give the group an overlay or caption, too. You can add multiple soundtracks for groups, of for the whole video. Once you’re happy, you can generate and download the video in QuickTime and QT Mobile formats, as well as .flv (flash video). Then just upload it to where ever you like.
The downside to just using the graphical editor is that it leaves out a lot of options you might not realize you have. You can actually control transitions and duration properties by editing the video’s XML file, which is readily available via a button on the bottom right-hand portion of the editor screen. The XML code that the site presents really isn’t too hard to read, so don’t be intimidated. Just change the values inside the quotes to whatever you like.
This site is a great idea, and the developers deserve a pat on the back for making it so simple to make videos. However, once the service gets out of public beta, a preview option, as well as some more common options on the graphical interface would be really helpful. Options like timing, transitions, perhaps even text formatting would make this an extremely popular service very quickly, in my opinion. Although these can be modified using XML coding, I doubt that many users are going to be very familiar and/or comfortable with that type of work environment. Check out my video as an example of one made with some very mild alterations in the XML code, and give it a crack while you’re at it.
