Video2Cartoon is supposed to work on Windows or Mac. I received the Windows installer when I opted in for the free promotion. How do I download the Mac installer?

‘4 easy steps’ Ha-ha-ha-ha! There is nowhere near enough instruction, since the shown ones DON’T work. I trialed an 11-second file and after 4 hours it was still stating over an hour before finishing the process.

Those who earlier described this programme as ‘does not work’ are absolutely correct. If you haven’t downloaded it yet, DON’T! You will be glad you DIDN’T!

In spite of all the bad comments I wanted to try this for myself. TLDR: PC Winsoft has a poor execution of reasonable idea that others have done better for free. The simplicity of the user interface is appealing until you realize nothing is explained anywhere. In contrast, the free VSDC video editor does something very similar and (at least on my 8-year old PC) it does it in real time with very little lag, a 5-minute movie from various video and sound files with lots of effects, takes less than 10 minutes, including the processing for a very similar effect for a longer duration. The one video I was able to convert with Video2Cartoon was originally about 15 seconds, and conversion to a cartoon took over 20 minutes.

I tried loading in a copy of a video in case the program attempted to overwrite the original — it didn’t, always a plus in my book! The first video loaded, and from the very dark opening screen the program created a preview of geometric shapes in various colors, in about half a minute. Hmmm. I clicked the button to create a cartoon video and the program appeared to freeze. Let it sit another minute, nothing. Task Manager to the rescue to kill it. I tried a second video, and it wouldn’t even load without locking up the program. Not one to be overcome by challenges, I tried it again with same results. One more try, a third video, and this time I tried to drag and drop it into the area that says “Drop movie here”. Got a “No” symbol on the mouse cursor until I dragged it BELOW that area. This video loaded in. Preview pic actually looked sort of like a blurry kaleidoscope view of the opening scene. I looked into settings. Twice it says I can type decimals into text fields. Ok. But nothing tells me what the options do, with labels like Paint and Blur, some of which appear more than once. I tried changing some and the preview pic changed slightly after a few seconds. Seeing no obvious way to get a simple line-drawing effect, I hit the Convert to Cartoon button. It told me it would take about 4 minutes, a number which eventually grew to at least 18 minutes before I left and washed dishes. When I came back, it said 0 minutes left, all the buttons were greyed out, nothing responded. I looked for my new cartoon and couldn’t find it. I looked in Task Manager and saw the program had a subtask called “Save As”. Ok, I started minimizing windows until I found an Explorer window asking me where to save the new cartoon video, what to name it. Clicked ok, and resulting video cartoon was ok. Not what I had hoped for. My 4 MB input file was converted to a 5 MB cartoon.

The successful input file was a 4 MB .MP4. One of the failed videos was a 2 MB .MOV, the other was a 16 MB .MOV. But program help file says it will convert any format. And that’s about all it says. For instructions it says to load a movie and save the cartoon file. Seriously.

So, while VSDC has a much bigger learning curve, it would take me well under 5 minutes to do this and several other video effects. I don’t think I can change the filter values in VSDC, but in Video2Cartoon they seem pretty meaningless and hit-or-miss. Might take dozens of trials at 15-30 minutes each to figure out if your tweaking is moving things in the direction you want. From all the changes I tried, I don’t think you get very far from the basic default vision of a cartoon.

I didn’t try trimming the input video but it looks simple, and that’s a very helpful, powerful feature to have (so I don’t need to load the movie into VSDC to trim it first). I can’t see any reason to try this program again unless a lot more work goes into it. If you like the sort of thing it does and can put up with not knowing which files will work, and have lots of time for your PC to process in the background, and love to experiment, well you might like this one. Not for me.

If someone has a different experience and can explain the filter settings, please let us know :)

ss