Stop motion animation may seem like not very useful to online publishers, but it can be a nice and inexpensive replacement of the "info graphics" in a paper-based magazine. Stop motion animation can be used for educational purposes as well.
iStopMotion 2 Pro is a professional-grade stop motion animation program developed by Boinx Software. It has a nice and simple interface, but nevertheless allows you to create a stop motion animation project from beginning to end. It comes with some basic compositing capabilities and enables you to perform simple rotoscoping, add a soundtrack, etc. It makes the creation process a no-brainer using a clever implemented onion-skinning feature, and allows you to output into broadcast formats as well as web-efficient media sizes. And it takes input from still cameras as well as (SD or HD) camcorders.
iStopMotion comes in a couple of versions, of which we could test the Pro version. The Pro version has some extras not available in the other two, such as the ability to send an animation to Final Cut Pro and a noise reduction algorithm that works great. Recording video in iStopMotion really is capturing frame by frame. If you are on a really tight budget, you can use a simple iSight webcam to start capturing those frames.
If you have a still camera, such as a dSLR, you can import those images into iStopMotion Pro and they’ll be automatically converted into frames. Not all still cameras are supported, but most of them are. If you’re going to record from a camcorder or an iSight, you can optionally set a recording interval in seconds, minutes and even hours (you can also set the program to create frame-based intervals). For example, if you’re going to capture a flower blooming, you’ll probably set the interval to minutes if not hours.
Continuous recording, onion skinning, live preview...
Continuous recording is possible with iStopMotion as well. It’s not what you buy the application for, and it’s only available in the Express and Pro versions. You’ll only need it to make some actions more realistic—a falling brick, or simply zooming in on your scene.
While most of the hard work will happen outside of iStopMotion and in your animation “studio”, I found iStopMotion to have an impressive array of features to make your work as easy as possible. Blinking, for example, lets you see your live preview and the previously captured image or frame intermittently, so that you can easily see the difference between what was and what is to come next. The preview frame is marked, so there’s no guessing in the process.
Onion skinning is a feature that we probably all know—the program shows you a customisable number of previously recorded frames in a subdued mode. Rotoscoping and lip synching are tools that are required in a professional environment. They allow you to record a scene using a real actor before recording the scene with the animated figures. This functionality as well works with overlays.
A soundtrack can be imported and very basically manipulated in iStopMotion Express and Pro. You should note that what you can do in iStopMotion Pro with sound is really very basic. I would say this is the weakest feature of the program, because I found you need an application like SoundTrack or something comparable which allows you to load your movie, add your dialogues and sounds to it while playing the movie—for synching reasons, obviously—and then save your sound file to an AIFF or other QuickTime sound file.
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Compositing features
The next step is then to import the sound track in iStopMotion where all you can do is start playing a bit earlier or later. I can see why Boinx choses not to include more functionality in this area, but on the other hand, it does hinder your workflow a bit.
iStopMotion has some capabilities in the area of compositing, such as setting a foreground and a background for your scene. In the Express and Pro versions, you can create your own foreground and background and use these instead of the default ones that come with the program. The foreground feature is very easy to use. You just select your setting and click the button, and it gets added across all frames automatically.
The background is less easy, and that’s because iStopMotion 2 uses Chroma Keying for removing your scene’s existing background and replacing it with something else. Chroma keying is a professional feature, and it requires you to select a folder full of background footage, then activate Chroma Keying and selecting the background element. iStopMotion will try to detect the background colour automatically.
Unfortunately, no software program has the intelligence to decide which colours belong to a background, unless that background is uniform and different from the foreground. As with any chroma keying, it’s the operator who should set up his scene in order to make chroma keying possible. If you don’t know that, you’ll be in for a long session of trying and failing—I really think the manual should explain that a little bit better.
Except for the powerful capabilities iStopMotion has in my opinion, I was enchanted by the program’s interface. Just as with Boinx Software’s MousePose, the interface is beautiful, but more important: it’s also efficient. The timeline shows every “layer” of frames you can add to your project without feeling cramped or overloaded with information, the buttons are carefully laid out and well defined; in short, the whole interface is an exercise in how to support the activity the application is meant for in the best possible way.
The price of the Pro version is not cheap in absolute figures—356 EUR—but if you consider what you get in return, it’s certainly worth the price, and if you’re going to use to add some spectacular or fun-looking info-animations to an online publication, it’s just cheap.
