SWGenGUI (the shrinking automator)

[swfn]

This is a project in which I have been working these last years in part of my leisure time. It consists on a program which, given a background image and a bunch of rendered PNG pictures, automatizes shrinking/growing and/or zooming in/zooming out procedures in order to generate animations in a video file; nothing more, nothing less.

Initially it was conceived just for my own use and "delight", being the initial version just a command-line application reading a file with a bunch of numerical data involving coordinates, zoom values, proportions, and so on. These projects were so tedious to create, and finally that forced me to learn GUI programming, which generated as a result a friendly graphic interface after some months of learning and development. For this reason, now that this application ended up with a more intuitive interface, I have decided to share it with you all.

Do not expect a program doing miracles, it just does what it does: size, zooming and position manipulations using static images. The good point is that, once the pictures are readied in Photoshop (namely, removing the background and replacing it by transparency), the preparation of a project of this kind takes only few minutes.

In the next days I will be uploading some written tutorials with practical examples about how most of its features work. Until then, you can download it and try tweaking the most basic features by yourself.

Current version: 1.3

Download links:

SWGenGUI-1.3 (64-bit)
SWGenGUI-1.3 (32-bit)

This program is portable and thus it does not require installation, it suffices with just extracting the zipped contents. It is compiled for 64-bit Windows operating systems. The application is written in Qt-C++ with MinGW and its source code is attached, so that anybody with programming skills can compile it with their own environment.

I will be also uploading updates/new versions as long as I discover new bugs, improve existing features or implement new ones.

******************************* CHANGELOG: *******************************

v1.3:

• Portable version through static linking. Less space and no more DLL dependency.
• Bug fix involving incorrect group index when switching between scenes, which could lead to crashes.
• Added missing information when saving/loading projects, regarding changes in SW overlapping order between scenes, which was mistakenly not taken into account in prior versions.
• Minor interface improvements.

v1.2:

• Added a new feature to encode in a separate process (enabled by default in the 32-bit version and disabled by default in the 64-bit version), selectable in Preferences. Allows a larger allocation of RAM for the encoding video subprocess, very important in 32-bit processes (which are limited to 2 GB of maximum data allocation).
• Interface improvements.

v1.1:

• Included a 32-bit version.
• Automatic zoom adapting after changing the resolution of an existing project.
• Fixed video format switching issue.
• Fixed "Redistribute SWs..." action.
• Bug fixes.

****************************** OLD VERSIONS: ******************************

SWGenGUI-1.2 (64-bit)
SWGenGUI-1.2 (32-bit)
SWGenGUI-1.1 (64-bit)
SWGenGUI-1.1 (32-bit)
SWGenGUI-1.0 (64-bit)