WebcamTweaker: Looks Sharp but Fails to Get the Picture

It’s great that iSights are built into essentially all of the most popular Macs hitting the streets these days. Many of us have had a lot of fun messing around with Photo Booth or chatting with a few friends over iChat. Apple has given Quicktime Pro users and iMovie users the ability to capture video from their iSight, a task that probably isn’t needed too often but can definitely be very handy. Unfortunately Quicktime Pro offers relatively few options for what format to record your video into. Here is where the awkwardly named WebcamTweaker by TweakerSoft enters the scene. WebcamTweaker professes to be the ultimate application to meet your iSight video-recording and photo-snapping needs and almost makes it but fails in a few key area that could really disappoint it’s users.

The premise of WebcamTweaker is pretty similar to Photo Booth, there is a main viewer window that shows your iSight video, to this video you can apply a number of live Quartz Composer effects and see how they look. The included effects are a bit of a mixed bag, many you’ve seen before, some are really cool and original but lots are nearly useless and very gaudy. My personal favorite filter is ColorEdge (see above), sadly most of the other original video filters are absolute garbage.

Part of the reason for the existence of these unimpressive filters is that it’s so easy to make them. TweakerSoft provides simple (and somewhat unclear) instructions in the WebcamTweaker FAQ explaining how to make your own filters. As a tip, if you want to use your on Quartz Composer filters, you’ll probably have to make your own “Filters” folder in the location the FAQ specifies and then you will need to create your own folder within “Filters” in-which to place your home-made Quartz Compositions. In-spite of some trouble with the FAQ I find the custom filter feature of WebcamTweaker very well executed.

The feature set of WebcamTweaker is pretty diverse without being overwhelming. On the main viewer window you are presented with five simple options: time lapse video options, record video, take photo, show multimedia drawer and finally show effects drawer. The interface is simple but fails to shine. Tool-tips are lacking from the five options I’ve described making things more confusing than is necessary for first time users. From the preferences window you can control the save destination, whether or not the image is mirrored and what format to save your videos as. WebcamTweaker allows you to save your recorded video to a wider range of H264 and Raw video dimensions than Quicktime Pro’s iSight recorder but you are still not offered the ability to save to any format or dimensions you wish. The preset video export modes are H264 iPod, H264 640 x 480, H264 email, No Compression 320 x 240 and No Compression 640 x 480. Thankfully if you need your videos converted to another format it won’t be hard to do so from the “No Compression” modes. WebcamTweaker also makes easy it for you to set your iChat or Mac account user icon to a photo you have taken or send a photo to your email or iPhoto all with only the click of a button. Controlling when a shot is taken or a video starts is brought to a new level by letting you control WebcamTweaker with the Apple Remote.

Still, my biggest problem with WebcamTweaker came when I needed it the most. I was filming a very important “Speaker’s Corner” type video with my MacBook Pro’s iSight where a few fellow students would sit down and share their opinions for a moment. WebcamTweaker seemed like the perfect solution. The filming itself went very well, we set WebcamTweaker to record and let the students have their turns. Disaster struck when the last student pressed Command-Q (Quit) after he was done his segment of the video. This shouldn’t big a big issue, right? If I select quit in any reputable Mac Application while having unsaved work open the application will either save the work itself or prompt you to make sure you’d like to quit. Unfortunately this major oversight that made it into WebcamTweaker, you can quit without your video being converted into a usable form. So in the end I was left with a 20Gb chunk of data about which the developer of WebcamTweaker explains “there is nothing I can do for you to recover that movie”. Was it a stupid mistake for us to make? Yes, of course it was, but a great piece of software will always make it really hard to do something really stupid.

I wish I could say that $15.99 was an excellent price for a simple application like WebcamTweaker, but unfortunately I can’t. I feel like it’s just not a finished product. Furthermore, rumor has it that Mac OS X Leopard’s new version of Photo Booth will include many of the features of WebcamTweaker, so if you can make due with a free alternative until October your video will likely be more safe and you can save $16 to put towards your Mac OS X upgrade. You can try WebcamTweaker here.

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