June 11th, 2009 by Matt St-Georges
Before you read on, it should be noted that, I have been using version 5.1.1.6 for this review.
I used an older version of WebcamMax back in the day, so I pretty much knew what I was heading into. Having said this there are quite a number of features added, including chroma-key or “background removal” support, which I actually requested a while ago. So it goes without saying that their tech support is superb, even with this latest version, I had a virus and I reached the install limit and they gladly reset my serial number.
Anyways about the actual product it’s what we use to produce Fresh Air is Over-Rated, our weekly video podcast. I think it speaks for itself but let me elaborate. It has multiple picture-in-picture support, shows images, cycles webcams, plays videos and captures the desktop. All work flawlessly and even more stable and less CPU intensive then the previous versions. So it works great if you want to do shows live, you can put a watermark if you want, add text overlays it’s pretty much all there.
But what if you’re just a casual user? Well the best news for you guys, along with the broadcasters is this allows you to multicast. No longer can you only share your webcam with 1 application or 1 friend, but now you can broadcast to multiple sources. Other great things for the casuals is all the pre-made effects, there’s some for holidays, some are masks. They all have different uses for different types of people.
The transform effects are amongst the coolest one, there’s a sweet looking fire effect, color changing effects, distorting mirrors, snow and alot more.
The mask effects are pretty cool, they track your face and allow you to, you guessed it, wear a mask. So there’s animals like dinosaurs, cartoon characters like Shrek, glassses, hats and more (oh Batman!).
The frames have some usefulness to them, some are even animated like the lights and the tap that fills the screen up with water. You could also display the time, so if you plan to stream at a specific time, displaying the clock is a great way of letting people know the time, regardless of time zones.
The emotions effects is mostly just animated stuff, like football players and a smiley, AND DEATH!!!!
Then finally we have the text overlay, probably the least exciting one, but most useful ones. You can make it scroll, change the color, the background color, the font, the size, it’s highly customizable.
The great thing about all the effects is they’re savable with custom thumbnails, plus if you don’t think there’s enough, and you can’t create more, you can download more from the internet right in the application.
That about does it, I’d just like to say I tried the beta or alpha version of 6 and it’s pretty awesome, the only problem is it doesn’t work with Adobe Flash Media Encoder, once it does it’ll hopefully be out of it’s alpha/beta phase. Check out www.webcammax.com for a free trial and at least give it a shot, it’s great.
I’ll give it a 4 out of 5 stars simply because I’ve seen the improvements coming in the next version, and there is always room to improve with these sort of apps, so a perfect score would be a rare thing from me.
