About Us
Toonamation is a computer graphics company that was founded to help users make photos and videos look cool with little effort. We’ve developed unique, proprietary technology enabling users to give photos the visually striking looks of painted or inked panels in graphic novels and comic books. Similarly, Toonamation tech can “rototoon” video clips automatically to look like hand-crafted, labor-intensive rotoscoped animations, as in the movie “A Scanner Darkly” and the animated Schwab commercials.
As our video demos demonstrate, (here comes some tech talk) our video output is more temporally coherent and has fewer noise artifacts than that produced by conventional posterizing. In other words, figures better retain their shape and color as they move. Our approach doesn’t use intensity or luminance-based bins for its segmentation, so the quality of our output remains high and doesn’t degrade when processing dark images. This is not the case for other approaches intended to automatically generate toons from photos or videos.
Besides our superior ability to naturalistically segment color, we’ve also developed a novel method of edge detection that provides cleaner, more usable, more aesthetically satisfying one-pass outlining from arbitrary photo input, such that the result simulates a line drawing, than that produced by current commercially available computer graphics applications or plugins. This means that users don’t have to spend HOURS outlining figures or cleaning up dirty, splotchy output. Our edges are also temporally coherent and work well for video.
Our effects are available for B2B licensing, and we are actively looking for partners to work with us in fielding online and offline applications. For online applications, such as use by photo-sharing and video-sharing sites (or for stand-alone photo-editing or video-editing), Toonamation tech supports automated image analysis for setting and tweeking parameters. This means that users can get aesthetically satisfying results from just a few, simple default settings the great majority of the time. Alternatively, we can provide an API for fine-tuned customization of offline output, especially useful when rototooning is built into a plugin for a major computer graphics application, such as the ToonIt! plugin for After Effects, Final Cut Pro, and Photoshop, which we are releasing jointly with Digital Anarchy.
There was a great response to pre-release demoing of ToonIt! at NAB in April, so we expect that new plugins with embedded Toonamation capabilities will be of major interest to users of 2D and 3D computer graphics applications. We are especially interested in pursuing plugin development projects with partners who have an established market presence and who can supply the application/platform-specific front-end and GUI for a plugin to accompany our back-end. We also think that having an opportunity to play with rototooning can be enjoyable and enhancing to user experience in many other potential market segments, including mobile applications involving user-generated photo and video and after-market photo-oriented products and services.