Toonamation

Loads of Automatic Cartoon Effects

Posted in Uncategorized | December 7th, 2009 No Comments »

From the many cartoon, painterly, and artistic effects developed by Toonamation, we’ve pulled out a selection of the best at producing good-looking results automatically (without tweaking) for the widest range of videos. We think they’re well-suited for server-based user editing of web or mobile video clips. These effects aren’t real-time, but they are available as multi-threaded binary libraries for Windows or *NIX servers that are still quite fast. They also scale up cleanly for use with HD video, and will be great for editing video keepsakes for gift DVDs. We’ve been working on GPU-based acceleration using CUDA (to allow us better quality and a wider variety of effects than available through Flash) and have seen 7X speedups so far. By early spring of next year we expect to be able to offer real-time versions for many of these effects at 12-15 frames per second at web or mobile phone display resolutions - especially suitable for conversational and interactive video.

Click on any icon to pop the corresponding 640×360 demo video.

ETA (5/11/10): It’s taken a little longer than we expected, but we’ve completed a CUDA GPU port of the acrylic effect below, and I’ve recently clocked it at over 100fps at 320×240 resolution, 12fps at 720p. We’re in the process of porting the rest of the effects.

Original Clips: