Hi everyone!! I need advice..I have been trying to find a program for two days now that is affordable and that will do what I need it to do. Heres the gist of what I am trying to accomplish. I have a avi file that is a video of people running and summersaulting. I want to change their heads to cartoon characters in the video. I figured the only way I could do this, since they are moving...is to to somehow turn the avi into frames that are individual .jpgs and edit each frame with some kind of paintshop program and then save and recompile. I guess my ? is...is there a software out there that I can do this with.

1) open avi
2) view all frames
3) edit each frame with a photoshop program of somesort.
4) resave as an avi but have the video go through with cartoon heads on the people


any advice would be helpful!! Thanks:yes:

Ideally you would want to keyframe the cartoon heads so that they follow the video smoothly. With something like After Effects that would be a pretty straight forward task.

In this case, since you're looking for free options, you can convert an avi to a series of still images with AVCutty (http://www.avcutty.de/), then use pretty much any paint program and do the heads by hand.

You might also want to look into Blender (http://www.blender.org), which granted it has way more features than you need, but it's got a pretty fully featured compositing portion.

Other tools worth looking at that may or may not help you:

Jahshaka (http://jahshaka.org/)
Wax (http://www.debugmode.com/wax/)
Videocharge (http://www.videocharge.com/)
zs4 (http://www.zs4.net)

You can (or could last time I checked) get blender free from cnet downloads.com

But I strongly agree just use after effects. tbh you could even do it in premiere pro.