Recently, Korean products, services, and contents have been active in various fields, such as in K-pop, beauty, and food. In particular, K-webtoons is enjoying its golden age, taking the no.1 spot in monthly sales in the Japanese cartoon market, which is widely regarded as a powerhouse in comics. We were able to have an interview with Idea Concert Co., Ltd. (CEO Dalyong Jeon), a company in the ICT Culture Convergence Center, which is operated by the Ministry of Science and ICT and the National IT Industry Promotion Agency. as it has been receiving a lot of attention in the K-webtoon market of 900 billion, being the company behind the novel software used to make comics into video content.
Q. Please give us an introduction to Idea Concert
A. Idea Concert is an IT company established in 2015, and it produces and develops the 'Webtoon Movie' software which is used to turn webtoons or comics into videos.
Q. How is Webtoon Movie different from other video editing software already in the market?
A. The UI for the software was designed to be as simple as possible, so that anyone can easily create video content. When the webtoon file to be edited is uploaded, it automatically recognizes the cuts and separates the image into layers by background, people, and objects. The user then can add various effects on top to create a video.
Q. It looks easy to use, but it seems like difficulties may arise in production for companies that are working with such video editing tools for the first time, regarding issues with time and manpower.
A. We actually offer services where we create the video in house for companies that face difficulties in video production.
Q. Do you offer technology or services related to webtoons other than the video editing tool?
A. We are developing a webtoon translating tool. The current method for webtoon translation changes the words into text, and the translated text is made back into an image. Idea Concert has developed a tool that deciphers and extracts the text from the image using Optical Character Recognition(OCR), and then inserts the translation back into the image, making it available for download.
Q. What are Idea Concert's future plans?
A. Idea Concert acts as a bridgehead between cultural content and technology. We wish to spread happiness and joy amongst our users through continuous development of content and technology.
Electronic Times Internet Reporter Eunjung Judy Yu(judy6956@etnews.com)