Stop-motion software

A while ago, I asked watmm about gif-creating software. I've grown a bit since then and now I need a program that would allow me to combine jpgs or gifs in a avi or mpg format. If the program would be able to combine sounds and music as well, would only be a bonus.

Anyone got any ideas, recomendations?

Well, Flash can accept GIF and JPG, but you'd have to lock the resolution of your output movie so the pixel-based elements don't get all blocky if the movie is scaled up or played fullscreen...

Any video editing software would allow you to do that really. For animation many people use after effects, and adobe premiere is a pretty user-friendly video editing suite.

  On 9/1/2009 at 5:17 PM, assegai said:

Any video editing software would allow you to do that really. For animation many people use after effects, and adobe premiere is a pretty user-friendly video editing suite.

Yeah, After Effects would work, but I don't know if it could do frame-by-frame tweening (it's been years since I messed with it) like Flash can, although if you're working with GIF/bitmap formats anyways, that wouldn't help you.

Windows Movie Maker

(semi-seriously)

  On 9/1/2009 at 5:20 PM, Joyrex said:

  On 9/1/2009 at 5:17 PM, assegai said:

Any video editing software would allow you to do that really. For animation many people use after effects, and adobe premiere is a pretty user-friendly video editing suite.

 

Yeah, After Effects would work, but I don't know if it could do frame-by-frame tweening (it's been years since I messed with it) like Flash can, although if you're working with GIF/bitmap formats anyways, that wouldn't help you.

I thought we were talking about stop-motion, not flash-based vector graphics. After Effects could just about do anything you can imagine with animation, it's my primary go-to program. What exactly are you trying to accomplish? If you're talking about illustrator/vectors then Joyrex is right, go with Flash.

Edit: Music/SFX you're definitely going to want to do that in post. Adobe Premiere, Avid, Final Cut Pro, Quantel, Vegas etc..

Thing is, I have 1100 frames here, and most of them will have custom time-stamps on, so I need a program, that will be fast and simple, concerning working with lots of pics. Flash I don't know, and defintely can't use too well I'm afraid. As for Windows movie maker: its been great, but please, no more. The quality of the output sucks.

I'm working my way through all the freeware now, damn, so much trash there...

If you're not afraid of doing this in a hackish way: mplayer can encode a series of numbered image files into a movie file. You can edit that resulting file with your favorite movie editing software.

If you have a numbered sequence of images you can easily pop them in premeire as "import sequence" and it creates a nice clip for you to edit and you can toss your music/sfx in there. It's not free be any means though. Export it high quality with h.264 and you're good to go.

  On 9/1/2009 at 5:34 PM, assegai said:

If you have a numbered sequence of images you can easily pop them in premeire as "import sequence" and it creates a nice clip for you to edit and you can toss your music/sfx in there. It's not free be any means though. Export it high quality with h.264 and you're good to go.

or you import the sequence into after effects, same deal; if it doesn't import it as one composition with sequenced layers, you can select all the layers and choose "sequence layers" through animation presets or something like that. after effects (or to some degree) premiere are what you wanna work with. and you can tween in after effects, but flash is friendlier with traditional animation-style tweening (shape tweening and other nonsense). doesnt sound like you need that though

Ok, Premiere I have, but: Is it really practical to work with 1100 frames in Premiere? The way I remember trying to work witg gifs and Premiere, nothing went as it should.

I'm gonna try Premiere though and also Stop-motion pro. But please, do keep the ideas flowing in, I desperately need them.

  On 9/1/2009 at 5:47 PM, gaarg said:

Ok, Premiere I have, but: Is it really practical to work with 1100 frames in Premiere?

Yeah, when you import the frames it creates one movie clip.

Which you can use the razor/scissor to cut up and edit.

1100 frames at 30fps is only about 18 seconds of animation correct?

i can suggest after effects once more, if that helps

if you wanted to keep the images seperate in the timeline in premiere you could always go into your preferences and change the default still image length to a 30th of a second, or 25 in PAL. then provided your images are named sequentially, select them all and drop all of them into the timeline at once and they should order automatically.

also you wont be able to export gifs from premiere, but you can import your premiere sequence into After effects and use it as a composition, then you can render out from AE as a gif, if that makes sense

The frame-rate I'm working with is around 7,8 frames per second. So, there's gonna be an awful lot of editing and time-stamping.

After efects I never used before, I guess now is a good time to change that.

After Effects is a good choice, I use it all the time... but if you have Quicktime Pro you may be set. Quicktime can import image sequences. You can also combine two movies or trim the video if needed. Not to mention, it exports high quality video and in my experience renders animation codec quicktime files faster than After Effects.

fuck yeah http://www.dragonstopmotion.com/blog/?p=256

If you're on a Mac, Final Cut Pro, or iMovie might fit the bill as well, although iMovie might be a bit light on the feature set for what you need...

Also, I forgot about this, but again, if you're on a Mac, Pencil might fit the bill.

Nope, Windows user.

I got better results with Movie maker, but it takes too long to get those gifs together (I got a slow machine)

"also you wont be able to export gifs from premiere, but you can import your premiere sequence into After effects and use it as a composition, then you can render out from AE as a gif, if that makes sense"

honestly, i can suggest after effects one more time, but that's the last time. you can control framerate, image duration thru timeline, simple shit broseph

Thank you.

And everybody else. I think with this much information I cannot fail no more.

Thanks again watmm. I'm gonna go fry some Cordon bleu now!

I used to use flash but then moved to after effects , i couldnt believe how much better and flexible it was than flash.

ms paint

my ass paint

+1 for quicktime pro. It's really easy to use. You just need to open the first pic (i.e SDC10401), select the frame rate, then it will open the other pictures (SDC10402, SDC10403, etc...) and make a movie out of them. You might need a renamer like Ant Renamer(haven't tried it though).