Xtranormal (Beta) Animation Software Review, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

I have been looking to find a nice and easy animation software to use for a while and the best one I have found so was was Xtranormal.

Xtranormal is an animation software that is available in two versions; a web version and a desktop application. Both versions need internet access and you must login to your account in order to use the application as well as for downloading components such as animation characters, background images, etc which you have to pay for.

The Xtranormal application is easy to use and their trademark slogan "If you can type, you can make movies™" is certainly true although creating a "movie" is rather a stretch on the capabilities of the software and its current features.

To make an animation all you have to do is:

1. select a background to be used 
2. select one or more characters(actors/actresses)
3. Type the dialog for your character

and that's all there is to it. If you want to create something more than a simple animation, you can use the "market place" button to view more characters, backgrounds, voices or even use your own sound files. You can also select or set your own camera angles. Also there is a lot of flexibility in where your characters are standing, where they would be facing, so the characters could be moved anywhere in the 3D set.

There are additional features for characters to take on a more realistic personality, for example you can dictate that a character should perform a "gesture", hold a certain "posture" or look at the camera or another place.

All in all I would say it's a great piece of software, however it doesn't feel like a finished product or something one could use for an important or serious animation for the reasons I have listed below:

• The text to speech conversion is quite bad and primitive. When I think of other software and technologies that I have used for text to speech conversion I can clearly see there is a lack of expertise in this area at Xtranormal. Since this type of technology has been around for a long time, I had much higher expectation for this core functionality. This is the single biggest problem with this animation application. If the speech isn't good enough, there isn't much use for any created animation that makes use of these voice libraries. This also contradicts Xtranormal's mission statement/slogan: "If you can type, you can make movies™". One of the problems with the speech is that it is too fast and un-natural. I try to compensate for this problem by inserting commas into my text however there is no control over the length of pause a comma makes.
• The application consumes a lot of resources and is very slow. There seems to be a lot of memory leak by this application and no word of fixing this issue yet from the team. Obviously these issues only become prominent once you decide to create an animation that is more than a few minutes long and make use of a larger scope of features.
• Although you can manually set the camera angles, this is a time consuming process so if you decided to let the application run on auto-pilot setting beware that it will make very poor camera selections. For example one character could be talking and the auto-pilot camera would show the other character.
• There is an option to add a pause anywhere in a dialog and the length of a pause can be manually controlled(the default is set at 2 seconds) however the shortest pause currently available is one second which is too long in some cases. A more fine-grain control over the pause would be very useful because a one second pause in a conversation seems like a lifetime.
• There is no synchronization between the desktop application and the web version. So if you started your work on the desktop version, you would not be able to continue your work from a browser or vice versa.
• Some characters are not capable of performing all gestures that are listed to be available for them. For example the Albert Einstein character on the desktop version of the application can not perform "dance wave", "dance twist" or the "dance turn" gestures.
• The application provides some nice gestures such as "folding arms" however the same concept does not exist as a stance, so a character can not remain in a stance with folded arms.
• Bug: If you create an animation with enough dialog boxes to cause the scrollbar to appear, you will come across an annoying bug. Every time you add a new dialog, the page will automatically scroll to the top. So now you have to scroll all the way to the bottom to type something in the new dialog box.
• Bug: If you click the preview(play) button the tool you had selected last will be unselected and once the preview stops the "orbit" tool is selected which happens to be the first tool in the right hand side tool set.
• Bug: If you have imported your own sound files for a dialog box and try to play a preview it appears to be working fine but if you move click on a random location in the playing timeline progress bar the audio and video play out of sync.
• Bug: There are inconsistencies between the different voice libraries for example some voices read "IV" as four while other voices read it out as the letters "I" followed by "V"

Although I like this application, at its current state I would not recommend it. I will be exploring some alternatives animation application in the future and post reviews of them here, but for now, here is a video I created using Xtranormal.