The world of dubbing and lip syncing has come a long way since the days when high-pitched voice actors would jabber away in not-so-perfect harmony to Japanese Kung Fu fighters in the martial arts movies of the 1970s. In fact, digital animation technology has improved so much that it’s now possible to animate your own talking heads from your home PC.

CrazyTalk Media Studio promises to give you all the tools you need to import images and photographs before quickly applying mouth, head and eye movement to create realistic looking avatars and fun animations. At first we were a little dubious about the value of such a product, but were soon pleasantly surprised by the power of the utility.

Granted, our initial efforts were limited to taking pictures of friends and giggling inanely as they repeated audio clips from famous movies or songs. These first experiments were a little clunky to say the least and looked far from realistic when we relied on the automatic lip-syncing functionality. However, once you delve deeper into the settings, you start to realize that you can actually produce some impressive animations.

With enough tinkering you can customize everything from the teeth in the character’s mouth to their facial movements and their range of movement. Best of all is the built-in timeline, which gives you complete control of the animation and sound, much as you would do in Flash, or a video-editing suite. Complete with alpha channel support, the program is ideal for producing talking presenters to welcome visitors to your web site or presentations. The simple-to-use export facilities allow you to save to a range of formats whether as a media file, email attachment or a personalized greeting.

There are a few flaws with the program that are a little frustrating, but they fail to prevent CrazyTalk Media Studio from being a great program. Minor niggles are the lack of MP3 audio import support, and the relatively low number of preset templates and characters. The app does have a fairly steep learning curve but it’s good fun to use and is surprisingly powerful.