What is Stop Motion

Stop Motion is the art of making movies  by capturing each image, basically one frame at a time. Good recent examples are movies like Corpse Bride or the Academy Award wining Wallace and Gromit , but anyone can make a good stop motion or time lapse film.  You just need a camera, computer, one of our products (see products below), some patience and imagination. 

Time Lapse

All of our products can also produce time lapse movies, which can compress time and show flowers opening, clouds zooming through the sky, or buildings being made.

Note: Also works with USB Webcams, firewire and analog video via a suitable uncompressed Capture card

Down load trial for StopMotionMaker HDMI V2.3

 - EUR $40 or approx US $58

Designed as a professional framegrabber and is also due to it’s simple layout excellent for beginners to stop motion.

After numerous request to produce a basic framegrabber which had all the required tools used by professional animators, without any ‘extras’ to get in their way, a new product has been produced, which will not only support the current USB Webcams, firewire and analog capture card video interfaces, but  also the new high definition (1920 x 1080) HDMI video interface (which is now available on some video and still cameras) via a ‘Blackmagic’ interface card in the computer.  Stop MotionMaker HDMI features are as follows:

-  variable size live/playback display,
-  Hot keys for main functions (changes are saved)
-  Go to Frame edit box.
-  Frame averaging,
-  Time lapse,
-  playback to live,
-  playback last 15, 24, 25, 30, 50, 60, 90 or 100 frames to live.
-  onionskin,
-  Loop (flip) live/last frame,
-  Sound synchronisation (can play past captured frames and track playback area to last frame),
-  Instant Preview Playback at selected framerate (even at HD sizes)
-  Produce AVIs or use compatible compression codecs when available (HD - DivX)
-  Record live video,
-  Play back video Window (also handy to play back a reference video. Eg a person walking etc).
- Save project in JPG or BMP image format, and
- Export in jpg or png image format.
- Export JPG or PNG at different HD size 1280 x 720.

-New ‘Xsheet’ function.  Use to keep track of lipsync or other information during a movie scene.

As can be seen below, Stop MotionMaker HDMI has a simple to use interface and is therefore also an excellent product for beginners to Stop Motion, which they can continue to use even as they become more proficient.    The images are also leading zero based identified (identical to SMMAdv), so they can be imported easily into Stop MotionMaker Advance, or most other image/video editors.

This image can then be simply imported into Stop MotionMaker Advance or any other image/video editors and only your imagination is the limit.  The image below shows the above image chromakeyed into a background of the Institute of Sport in Australia.

The image below was produced with just a Logitec 4000 webcam a pre-recorded avi video and Stop MotionMaker Advance V1.95 with the live image reduced/moved and chromakey keying turned off.

The reduced live image now chromakeyed with the avi video file.

Automated Pans and zooms across a large single or multiple still captured image.

Click Here to see a short clip made with this function

For more information on each on this products, please select the links on this page.