Montreal Tech Watch

Shooting user-produced videos with Xtranormal

By Heri Sep 5th 2008 in Business

The Xtranormal startup, which received a lot of attention a while ago, launched in beta (private) mode yesterday.

Like they previously announced, the interface to create videos is very simple to use, you just have to drag and drop animations, camera moves, gestures etc. You setup a scene first, choosing the look of characters, as well as the background scene, and the ambiant sounds, and then add dialogue boxes. After each update, you can see the short video clip, with their technology converting text into speech on the fly.

Seen above for instance is a (very) fictional dialogue between someone called Sebastien and Austin. If there’s any similarity between people you know in Montreal, it’s just a coincidence.

The sequence in itself was done in a couple of minutes, while I was just fiddling with the interface. Results are great, for the amount of time you put in, even though there are small bugs here and there. For comparison, this sequence would have taken at least a couple of hours in The movies. Seeing this, I know xtranormal should be a success for kids, teens, entertainement. I also foresee a huge market with brands (say toys, popular clothing brands, or could be used by big media companies for their shows). Great job, guys!

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Comments

  • Roberto Rocha September 05, 2008

    Very clever demo film, Heri. I laughed.

  • Heri September 05, 2008

    Thanks. It’s good not to be serious all the time.

    Hope the forementionned people do take it lightly

  • Fred Brunel September 05, 2008

    Hey Heri,

    Thanks for the kind words. We’re working hard to finalize the service for the launch.

    I’m glad you could have access to the beta :)

  • » Weekend Reading - September 6, 2008 | StartupNorth September 06, 2008

    [...] Xtranormal launched a private beta. [...]

  • Bosko September 06, 2008

    Heri, this is one of the funnier videos I’ve seen in some time. :-)

  • Austin Hill September 06, 2008

    Hahaha. I really enjoyed this Heri.

    Great demonstration of the Xtranormal technology and your own great sense of humor.

    Congratulations to Richard Szalwinski and the Xtranormal team. Richard is one of Montreal’s founding tech entrepreneurs who not only created Discreet Logic, but invested in a number of Montreal startups throughout the years.

    He was on the board of one my early companies, Total.Net and is a great local entrepreneur.

    We saw him at Demo 2008 and they did a great job of showing the tech. It’s great to see it start to be released.

  • Montreal Tech Watch » Xtranormal launches Mashface, just for fun October 10, 2008

    [...] the 3d software company which was to make a tool to create easily user-generated movies, has launched earlier this week mashface, a website where users can “mashup” and remix [...]

  • Montreal Tech Watch » [breaking] Xtranormal lays off 36; half of its staff November 25, 2008

    [...] (see beta review) which launced with much fanfare a little over a month ago has laid off today 36, which is half of [...]

  • Lawanna Biernat January 24, 2011

    Do you know of this content jogs my memory of one other identical one that Someone said in other places?

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