Magic Camera 8.0

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on December 10, 2012

Shining Morning's Magic Camera is shareware that adds a variety of effects and overlays to your Webcam feed, screen capture window, or saved videos and pictures. It's free to try, but the free version places a watermark and includes a nag screen. It's easy to use, but the effects it adds are run of the mill, and many are poorly rendered. Recent updates include Windows 8 compatibility. We tried Magic Camera in Windows 7.

Magic Camera's user interface is colorful and simple enough, but it's not especially attractive or intuitive, and the optional skin (for a total of two) barely changed the look. The icons and buttons are rendered at a lower resolution than we're accustomed to seeing in graphics-related shareware. The main window features a Webcam display above a panel for displaying files and an awkwardly phrased Help/FAQ feature, plus a couple of buttons that we couldn't quite figure out. There's an attached panel the height of the main window (but with a different style of interface) but it only contains a Webcam selector. We could also show our desktop with a draggable selector tool or load a still image or video clip to enhance and project over our Webcam feed. Clicking the Effects button opened the Effects panel. Magic Camera offers 12 categories of effects: Frame, Distort, Filter, Scene, PiP, Text, Flash, Emotion, Mask, Background, Animation, and Paint. Most offered a menu of preview examples. We merely had to click on an effect to add it to our image or remove it from the effects list.

While Magic Camera offers plenty of effects, the effects themselves range from average to lame, especially when compared with free tools that do much the same or more. Many of the effects had a greeting card look that's too cute by half. Several effects raised eyebrows: Bill Gates and Vladimir Putin are public figures, but Tigger and Shrek aren't. We saw both with no attribution or acknowledgement; worse, the Shrek images looks like some text has been obscured, and the Tigger images are actually animated. Better apps are available for less money -- even for free.

Editors' note: This is a review of the trial version of Magic Camera 8.0.

Magic Camera-Apply amazing video effects to your video chats.-Download Video Previews:

Publisher's Description

From ShiningMorning:

Want to add amazing webcam effects to your video chats by just one click? Want to stream files or screens to chat software / broadcasting websites like a real webcam? Want to protect your privacy in video chat rooms? Want to record webcam videos with cool effects? Want to make fun avatar pictures? Magic Camera does these all! Magic Camera is webcam software to enhance your webcam with 1000+ webcam effects. It adds a virtual webcam to let you play files, screens and video effects on video chats(e.g., Skype, Live Messenger). Recording webcam videos & taking pictures with webcam with effects are also supported. Magic Camera is hot for video chats & live broadcastings. The supported webcam effects include: 1) Funny photo frames; 2) Many fantastic video transforming effects; 3) Face tracking & mask effect; 4) Pop up Flash/Gif emotions and animations on webcam videos; 5) Typing texts or painting pictures directly on the webcam video; 6) Webcam video overlay; 7) Picture in picture; 8) Real-time webcam backgrounds replacement; 9) Online free webcam effects packages downloadable; 10) Want more? Visit http://www.shiningmorning.com for more information.

What's new in this version: Full support for Windows 8; improved webcam recording; enhanced text effects; no watermark if no effects applied; let user choose how to launch MagicCamera in webcam applications; saving effects after tweaking; keeping the same effects during loop playback; saving and loading the last effects.