Reverse Video has been a frequent request of our community and of the windows Movie Maker community… and is now live in Stupeflix!

(Note: if reverse video doesn’t mean much to you, check out these examples)

If you look at the many tutorials about how to reverse a video, you’ll find that you either have to download some software or extract all frames of a video to put them back together in reverse.

Now with Stupeflix you can do it all in one-click.

Here’s how it works:
1. Upload your video in Stupeflix
2. Select Settings in the menu over your video
3. Click Reverse

Now you too can do like R Kelly!

We’re big fans of the Dropbox service. Like 45 million people, we use it to save our files, to backup our files, we use it to share our files, and we use it to access our files from our phones and tablets.

Wouldn’t it be awesome to be able to use Dropbox to import photos and videos in your Stupeflix video projects?

Well it’s already here, and it is indeed awesome!

In the Add Images menu, select the new Import from Dropbox option – and browse all your folders and files to find the photos and videos you want to use for your Stupeflix video project. Pretty easy!

Now this opens up many possibilities.

First – assuming you are a Dropbox user – it makes it very convenient for you to use photos and videos you take on your phone to make videos on Stupeflix: the Dropbox app on your phone allows you to upload photos from your phone – or tablet – in the cloud on your Dropbox account.
What this means is that not only do you not need to download your files from your phone to your computer, but you don’t need to upload them from your computer to Stupeflix also! End result: lots of time saved.
This is so cool it should be a blog post of its own.

Another exciting possibility is collaboration. Say you just came back from a holiday with friends and everybody took photos, Dropbox is a great solution to have everybody share their photos in a single shared folder. And now you can make a Stupeflix video with everybody’s photos as well!

Let us know if you’re using the Dropbox import feature, and what you think about it!

In time for Holiday Greetings extravaganza, here comes SnowFlakes, a new theme to take your photos on a snow laden journey.

I don’t know about you, but the whole card picking, photo printing, envelope writing, stamp licking seems like a lot of work to me.
I don’t know about you, but receiving a beautiful video from a family member filled with photos is just awesome.
If you’re like me, send your greetings with a video!

There are a few special things about Snowflakes.

First, Snowflakes comes in 3 styles: Day, Night and Fizz. Change the style in the movie settings: your video will look completely different.

All your photos will be in full screen. Double-click a photo in your timeline to set how it will be placed in the video.

We added 4 special transitions for Snowflakes. In the Add More menu, select “Custom Transition”: try them all!

Text elements can be used in different ways: as the usual Title Slide and Captions, but you can also set a photo under a title slide, or add text in an lower-third style for your photos.

Still reading? Go try it out already!

Variations for snowflakes: Day, Night and Fizz

Snowflakes Special Transitions

Fantastic new feature alert!

You can now record videos, and snap photos, using your webcam – right from Stupeflix.

Here’s how it works: Use the “Add Images” menu, select “Record from webcam”, allow the use of your webcam, and… watch yourself appear in your own photo booth!

From there it’s pretty self-explanatory: you can snap photos – 3, 2, 1, smile! – or record videos. Once you’re done the photo or video will appear in your timeline. Double-click it and you’ll be able to edit the photo duration, or trim the video.

Warning: this is a lot of fun and can be addictive!

This week we released a bundle of changes to the pages where your videos live, to make it easier to share your creations with your friends. If you’ve made a great video people love, we want you to be able to show it in the best possible light.

So here’s the deal we have for you: If you make a Free video and get 5 Likes for it (the Facebook kind of Like), we’ll offer a free upgrade to 360p for your video . You’ll be able to show your video in higher resolution, in full duration (no more 1-minute limit), and you’ll even be able to download it!

We hope you’ll take full advantage of this deal, and get people who love your videos to Like them too!

This new feature, available in the Outline theme, lets you set manually the key part of your photo, to make sure it won’t be cropped out of your video. Once you’ve set the important point in your photo, it will be shown in your video with a gentle pan and zoom effect (aka Kenburns) centered around that key point.

To set the key point of your photo in Outline, double-click on a photo or choose the “Edit” menu option for that photo, the same way you would set a custom duration for a photo, or trim a video.

In Outline, every photo or video is shown in full screen. If a photo in portrait orientation is shown in a landscape-shaped frame, Stupeflix applies a pan and zoom effect to show it completely. When everything is moving fast with transitions left and right, it can result in the edges of a photo not being shown in the video. Which is unfortunate, because oftentimes a full body portrait has the head on its edge, and showing these photos without the head is not ideal, to say the least. This is why we’ve added this feature; so you can make sure that the most important part of your picture is not left out of your video.

We hope this will improve your video making in Stupeflix. Let us know what you think!

Shooting videos is getting easier with video cameras available everywhere. But getting the right footage is difficult. There’s usually only a small part of the video recording we actually need. Now, when you upload a video into Stupeflix, you can trim it to start and stop exactly when you want it to.

Video trimming has been one of our most requested features. It is now live along with the custom duration feature, and we hope you’ll find it useful and easy to use.

Here’s how it works: to edit the video, double-click its thumbnail in the timeline. Now the video will take a few moments to be processed. Once ready, you will see a film strip of your video at the bottom of your screen, and a large screen in the center to preview the video.

You can click anywhere in the film strip to see the corresponding frame in your video. You can drag this cursor to navigate within your video. And you can drag the yellow borders of the film strip to time precisely when the video will start and stop playing. Apply the changes and you’re done!

Here’s a quick demo to see it in action:

We’ve hinted at it to our Facebook friends, and now they are here: two new, gorgeous video themes to welcome your photos and videos. They’re called Unreel and Blueprint.

Unreel: develop your digital media

Unreel develops your digital photos on professional photo studio reel. This is the perfect theme to showcase a photo shoot, turn photos into a story. Your videos will look unreal! (had to do it ;)

Blueprint: be a video architect

Design and build a story with your photos and videos: that’s the idea of Blueprint. This is a great theme for real estate videos, product videos or to showcase your last weekend project.

Top 10 and Celebrate: farewell!

We’re big believers in listening to users and observing what they use to adjust our product as we go. Adding more is always good, but we also want to remove whatever we feel is less awesome or appreciated than we would like it to. That was the case for the Top 10 and Celebrate themes. They were used less than our other themes, and users sometimes had issues with them as they worked a bit differently from our other themes. So we discontinued them.

Just like when we retired the old Amour and Holidays themes, you can still open video projects that were created with Top 10 or Celebrate for a few months. If you don’t want to loose any of your work we encourage you to export a video now. Exported videos won’t be deleted, you can keep them in your account for as long as you want!

We hope you will like these new themes as much as we do. We’re already working on the next ones!

Today is a big day for Stupeflix, as we released a host of new and much awaited features. We’re going to blog about them one by one, and with this post, we start with Custom Duration.

As you may expect, Custom Duration lets you set for how long a photo will be shown during a video. Which is awesome! This is true for photos in your timeline, but also for Title Slides and for Maps.

To set a Custom Duration, edit the properties of the photo (or Title Slide, or Map), by either double-clicking it, or by choosing the “Edit” option when clicking the small arrow when your mouse if over the photo. Then tick the Custom Duration checkbox, and set the duration. You can actually set it precisely to a decimal amount (like 10.4 seconds instead of 10 seconds) if you feel like really fine-tuning your editing.

We’ve seen people sometimes get confused when trying to make a music video by uploading a song and a picture, which they intended to run in the background during the duration of the entire song. Well, now, you can do exactly that by setting the duration of your photo to the exact duration of your song.

More power to you!

A Facebook Friend tipped us off on this great post by Chris Smith over at Inman Next: Better than Animoto? YouTube Integrated Editing via Stupeflix

Inman Next is a new and great resource for real estate agents to learn how to use technology and the web to make more sales. We were thrilled to be featured by Chris and really love the video he put together to demo Stupeflix.

We see more and more real estate professionals using our video making app, we would like to thank all of our PRO subscribers who use the Studio to make great property videos like this one:

We’re big fans of Inman. It’s where technology meets real estate. Last year we participated to the Developer Challenge at the Inman Connect conference in San Francisco. We had a blast and won the Jury Prize. The enthusiasm of the audience that day, when we showed how to transform online listings into video virtual tours has convinced us that Stupeflix has great potential with the real estate industry.