Animation software help needed

What software can do stop frame animation?

[Trisha]

My husband used to do stop frame animation using 8mm film. They stopped manufacturing this type of film in the 80's. We now have digitals cameras to take still frames. Is there software out there that allows people to use their still frames as individual frames to make stop frame animation on a computer?

I have Flash 5 but haven't used it much. As far as I know the only way to do it with Flash would be to import individual pictures/frames in, but that used to make the flash files way, way too big for most purposes. I don't remember if I could control the frame speed to make it go fast enough either.

We do want to be able to show these animations on a web page too, so the software would have to be able to be saved in a file format that would allow that.

Any ideas?

[Matt Probert]

Animated GIF will do it - though the quality is poor, 256 colours and all that.

Failing that, there is software to compile frames into Mpeg movies. That should do the trick. Most video software allows the compilation of frames, but I think 'cmpeg' which is an old freeware application may be better for you.

Matt

[rocknbil]

Why not use Flash? I would look into some way to capture the entire film as a video. You should still be able to put start/stop controls on an individual movie once you convert it to an .mpg.

[Trisha]

I didn't want to use flash because of the tediousness of importing in all the pictures one at a time. And the size of the flash file created by doing that. I don't really know the number of frames my husband may be thinking of using for this, but my guess it that it could be quite a lot.

I still trying to find information about cmpeg.

[Demaestro]

Trisha

Newer versions of Flash that allow for actionscript will reduce the size of the flash file considerably... some know-how is required though....

I am seen a lot of pre-written actionscript that is easy to understand and re-purpose available in help sites.

[Trisha]

I was wondering if newer Flash versions would be better.

After digging around a bit it seems the more correct term to use is: stop-motion animation. I did a search and found quite a bit of software to do this. Still have to see if they are compatible with our computers and other details.

[John_Blake]

Have tried using software like Windows Movie Maker, Adobe Premiere Pro, Apple iMovie etc?

[Frida]

yup, Windows movie maker should do it!

[travelin cat]

Do you have Photoshop?

If so, go to Export > Render Video and choose "Image Sequence" to export individual frames in most standard formats (png, tiff, jpeg and more)

[thecoalman]

Batch convert you images all to the same size (this size should be the final destination size) and rename them as a sequence (image_01, image_02....) If you don't have software for this Irfanview can accomplish both.

Get virtualdub, open it and from the top go to file>open video file ... from the file types drop down box select image sequence. Select the first image in your image sequence. Thi will load all the images into virtualdub and set the frame size to whatever the images are.

Go to video and make sure "full processing mode" is selected. Also if you need to adjust the framerate you can select framerate to change it. Under compression make sure "uncompressed" is selected.

Go to file>save as avi ... save it. You use this file as source in other applications and can pretty much go anywhere with it. It's not suitable for anything else because its going to be huge in file size.

Being that you want to put this on the web I'd suggest loading it into Microsofts Media Encoder and exporting it as WMV which will give you a very compressed but high quality video.