Animation Software Review: YouTube's Stupeflix Video Maker

Stupeflix is yet another online slideshow generation tool based on user content. It's nothing spectacular, but it fills out the new YouTube suite of custom creation tools adequately. I'm not really stupefied by Stupeflix, but it serves its purpose.

While I wouldn't really call Stupeflix animation software, it does at least produce animated content in a limited form: usually composites animated as slideshows, lists, and presentations. Nothing you can't do in Powerpoint, but with the benefit of publishing directly to YouTube.

In the Stupeflix Studio, you can select the type of video you'd like to make: Outline, Top 10, and Celebrate. A rather limited suite of options, but you take what you get for free.

The biggest difference between this and the other two new content creation options on YouTube is that while Xtranormal and GoAnimate focus on using templated characters, sounds, and sets to act out original content, Stupeflix is all about your content: your photos/images, your music, your audio effects. You can cross-load images from your Picasa, Flickr, and Facebook accounts; you can use their music, upload your own, or enter text into the (frankly godawful) text to speech engine. The aim here is basically to slot your content into presentation format, and then make it move prettily.

The navigation is so simple it's hard to tell if it's pure elegance or an insult to the user's intelligence. Really, Stupeflix has what it needs to do what it does, and for what little it does, it works easily and neatly. Not much wow factor, but it accomplishes what it sets out to do, though I'm subtracting points for originality - or to be more accurate, lack thereof.