Comments

gpsmikey wrote on 6/10/2010, 4:50 PM
Check out the special offers at Digital Juice -- they have "Crazy Talk6 Pro" and the "animation toolbox" for it at 1/2 price. Actually works pretty well - I have it but have only played with it a little bit, but others seem to like it (also check out the links to the Crazy talk home page and their tutorials and demos). Start at the Digital Juice page:
http://www.digitaljuice.com/products/product_volumes.asp?pvid=18 Basically you use Crazy Talk to create your talking animal from your image and export as an avi which you can bring into Vegas or whatever NLE you have. Be sure and check out the tutorials - making the eyes, mouth,lips etc move is not trivial - you need something like this to make it look even somewhat real.

mikey
rmack350 wrote on 6/10/2010, 5:41 PM
I'll bet they used peanut butter for Mr. Ed, though.

Rob Mack
tonym59 wrote on 6/10/2010, 5:43 PM
I give it a try thanks.

Tony
Mikey QACTV7 wrote on 6/10/2010, 10:45 PM
I have used crazy talk for many of my productions. If you want even more you can get iclone 4. Does much more than crazy talk and you can even render 3d. Made buy the same people as crazy talk. I am in production of a televison movie using iclone. I do all the animation in iclone then edit scenes in Vegas. Here is a very rough draft of the trailer I am working on.

http://www.vimeo.com/6659040
dxdy wrote on 6/10/2010, 11:33 PM
Crazy Talk has done the job for me. The interface takes some getting used to, but the results are excellent. For this little talking dog, I trimmed a still out of a jpg using PhotoShop, filled the background with green, pulled it into CT, did the animation, exported to an avi file, and used Vegas chromakey to isolate the talking dog. He is 28 seconds into this clip.

http://www.vimeo.com/4854144
deusx wrote on 6/11/2010, 6:04 AM
If you want professional looking results you use a compositing app + a 3D app.

Model and animate an animal head/jaws in a 3D program ( to match what they are saying ) , match textures to the real animal on video and combine these two in a compositing program.
dxdy wrote on 6/11/2010, 8:31 AM
Here is another Crazy Talk dog. I didn't have a picture with much chin. The latest CT version does a good job on shoulders, too.

http://www.vimeo.com/7792491

And this one animated a newspaper sketch for a documentary

http://www.vimeo.com/7378648
LSHorwitz wrote on 6/11/2010, 11:57 PM
Here is a talking family dog I did a couple years ago with the prior version of Crazy Talk. The clip was emailed in a small wmv file and very little time was spent making it, but it nicely illustrates the program's features. It's extremely impressive for a 50 buck program IMHO.

Larry

http://www.vimeo.com/1324871

LReavis wrote on 6/12/2010, 11:10 AM
I now usually use Poser with or without the added talk animation plugin, but I used Crazy Talk maybe 10 years ago on a talking logo with good results. I couldn't find the old installation files, so I bought CT 2 LE on ebay for around $10, complete with It'sMe Avatar Editor. All loaded without a hitch on Win7-64 and seems to work OK, but I haven't yet seriously tested it. If I were planning serious work with CT, I'd probably go with the Digital Juice offer of the latest and greatest (I almost plunked down my cash a few weeks ago when DJ sent an email offer).
dxdy wrote on 6/16/2010, 5:34 PM
After recommending Crazy Talk 6 for making talking animals, I fired up the program today for the first time under Win 7/64 bit. Slow as molasses, preview blurry, wouldn't render. On their website I found the following:

"Why is the CrazyTalk work area blurry ever since I changed my operating system to Windows 7?

The problem could be caused by your graphics card drivers. When you install Windows 7, it will automatically install the graphics card drivers that are included with Windows 7. In order to solve this issue, you have to manually install the manufacturer's graphics card drivers. You can use the following links to reach the NVIDIA and ATI driver download sites.

Download NVIDIA graphics card drivers:
http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us

Download ATI graphics card drivers:
http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/Pages/index.aspx

Download Intel graphics card drivers:
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/default.aspx?iid=gg_support-EN_01+home_downloadctr
"

Since I have an NVIDIA 8500 card, I downloaded and installed the NVIDIA driver, and all my problems went away. Whew.
kkolbo wrote on 6/16/2010, 6:47 PM

I just threw up a couple of fast promos that I did for a high school with Crazy Talk. I think the OP was looking for something more sophisticated which would be the magic done in Maya, but for corporate video, this does the trick for a lot less money and a much shorter learning curve. These each took about 20 minutes, including finishing them in Vegas. Obviously for broadcast I would call in a 3D artist and go all the way.

Enjoy

[Link=http://amediaprof.com/blog/2010/06/crazy-talk-demo/]
gpsmikey wrote on 6/16/2010, 7:56 PM
Hey, those are cute !! Well done.

mikey