Anybody interested in stop motion/animation?

If you got a Mac and would like to experiment with stop motion, have you ever heard about Stop Motion Studio 1.3.2 X by Loud Incorporated? I came across a review of this application in the Swedish MacWorld today.

I read the review, found their website, downloaded the software and paid. All this was done by me in about 30 minutes, and I wasn´t particularly interested in animation to begin with. But this application really caught my attention, because I think it is fantastic. It is very easy to use, it runs in both Classic and OS X, it supports every camcorder with Firewire, you can even use web-cams with the USB connection, it exports to many file types (including DV) and it has a very nice price tag.

In the review they could tell that the company wanted to release two new versions in the future, one for professionals and one easier one for children.

If this sounded interesting, I suggest you take a look at their website:
www.loudmotion.com/

Ivan

Ivan,
thanks for the link, I just downloaded and paid for my copy, pretty fun. I have the old XL-1 so my camera doesn't have an interval timer function to do time lapse, now with SMS on my iBook I'm going to experiment.

I´m happy you liked it Rik. I agree with you, it was even a lot more fun then I had imagined. Keep on having fun, I know I will.

Ivan

very useful tool! I still work on Stop-motion animation by Frame Thief... but I found Stop-motion studio very simple to use than Frame Thief! thanks for your recommendation!

Faint! I have download stop-motion studio, but is too bad on my Mac. I use a PB G4/400 and 10.1.4 System, about 512M RAM. it still do everything is better, why stop-motion studio have display problem on the software interface.

Hi Rocky!

Can you describe your problem a little bit more detailed?

If you refer to the playback in the application, you will get a better result by doing what they recommend in the manual. I quote:

"Loading Movies in RAM

Loud Motion Studio's playback can be slow if you have an older computer or are dealing with high-resolution images. If you want to make the playback smoother, you can set Loud Motion Studio to load your animation into RAM. RAM is your active computer memory, which is faster than playing an animation from your hard drive. However, if you have a long animation, it can use a lot of RAM and Loud Motion Studio may crash. Each frame at full resolution can take up to a megabyte of RAM, so see if this solution is right for you.

To enable Loud Motion Studio to play movies from RAM, select "Preferences" from the Edit menu and enable "Load Movies Into RAM." From now on, movies will load into RAM and should play back more smoothly, but be careful with using too much RAM."

The best is to convert the project as a QuickTime file and watch it in QuickTime player.

Hope this will help you. Good luck.

Ivan

Hi,Ivan

Thank you very much! I will try again by your way, report to you later, hehe... The software very useful to me if it can be use. Thanks again! :-)

Rocky

I have downloaded the demo awhile back and thought it was cool. The interface is a bit too "Windows-ish" for me, meaning that it has a complete GUI that is HUGE. But it looks like it can do quite a lot of things for $40. Problem is, so can BTVPro, which is also $40. In fact BTVPro can do more. I am not sure if BTVPro can do stop motion, but it can do time lapse which is what I am primarily interested in at this point. Of course, Stop Motion Studio lets you add soundtracks and the such right in the app itself, and BTVPro seems to have a sync problem with sound.

A couple of days after getting the software, I've done my first real shoot using it. Shot the clouds passing over the horizon, it looks great I like the fact that you can choose the interval between each shot. Used every 10 sec. and every 7 sec. I used to hate the preset values on my old digital cameras: 30 sec. 1 min. 2 min. 5 min.

I used a 720 X 480 size and exported a DV quality quicktime movie, dropped that into FCP.

After 30 min. my iBook went to sleep and when I woke it up, Stop Motion Studio crashed, but it had saved all the stills in a folder so I just re-imported the stills and saved it as a movie, no problem.

Don't know if the sleep caused the crash but next time I'll disable the sleep function, but that's a great feature, even if it crashes, it has already saved the stills from the timelapse/stop motion, so all your work up until the crash will be saved.

Did you know FrameThief, 2.1.8 version has released and very useful too. but support still pic camera is not better. the plug-in still was a beta version. but FrameThief has more great function.