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The phrase "Just DeBabelize It!" is not just a marketing slogan for Equilibrium. It has become part of the common language spoken by game develpers everywhere. Need a bunch of graphics converted from 24-bit to 8-bit color using one palette that best represents all of the images? No problem. Need to stamp a copyright notice on each frame of an animation so you can publish it on your web site? No problem. Need to clean up bluescreen video and automatically composite actors and backgrounds? No problem. Those are the kinds of tasks DeBabelizer Pro eats for breakfast.
How many times have you converted graphics manually by opening each image file, clicking Save As, and then selecting the appropriate file format, all after mapping the colors down to 8-bit or some other equally pedestrian machination? Long ago, in the dark ages before I started using DeBabelizer, I can remember having to go through all sorts of gyrations to get palettes to behave and files to convert (not to mention trying to do anything "unusual" to the files, such as applying filters). Granted, at this point in time there are many programs, both commercial and shareware, that can run batch processes on groups of images, converting them to various file formats. However, most of these can't handle video or animation files, and none of them even come close to covering the scope of features found in DeBabelizer Pro.
During the course of preparing this review, I used DeBabelizer Pro 4.5 on a number of projects at Simutronics. I used the program's SuperPalette functions to map all of the front-end images for one of our adventure games down to a single 8-bit palette. When we needed to prepare animations for use on our web sites, I was able to process them down to the Netscape palette and add copyright information to each frame. I've performed countless other tasks with DeBabelizer Pro that would have been impossible (or at least, extremely time consuming) to accomplish with any other tool.
How Does It Work
The core functionality of DeBabelizer Pro is the BatchList -- quite simply a list of image files that can be sorted, saved, and processed as a group. Multiple groups can be organized within one BatchList, and...