Stop Motion Studio For Mac
HUE Animation Studio (Blue) for Windows PCs and Apple Mac OS X: complete stop motion animation kit with camera, software and book? @ Amazon @ Amazon The resolution of the camera is fairly low by today's standards (but common for webcams), but that's not a problem for many of the main usage scenarios for this camera.
Those who’ve spent much time watching jittering Lego blocks on YouTube, Wallace and Gromit shorts on an iPod, or recent Tim Burton animated films in the theater know that stop-motion movie-making is a going concern. For those unfamiliar with the term, stop-motion animation is the painstaking process of capturing still images of a scene, moving objects within the scene ever so slightly after each still image capture, and stringing together the resulting images as video frames so that when played back they mimic movement.
Unlike in the golden claymation days of Gumby and Pokey, creating stop-motion videos is well within the grasp and budget of the typical Mac user. With little more than a digital camera or camcorder, software, and a fair measure of patience and planning, you can create a compelling animated feature. Here are some suggested ways to go about it.
Tools of the trade
Camera You can’t very well capture still images without a camera. Although you could conceivably use your Mac’s built-in iSight camera, you’re far better off with a real camera that captures higher-quality images. This can be either a digital still camera or a camcorder. Which you choose largely depends on the software you use to assemble your animation. If you use a traditional movie editing application such as iMovie ’09 (), you’ll use a still camera to capture your images, import them to your Mac, and add them to an iMovie project.
Applications designed specifically for stop-motion animation can not only import images shot with a still camera (some can capture live images directly through the camera) but also capture images from a camcorder tethered to the Mac via USB or Firewire. If you have the option, a good still camera will produce better images than a typical consumer camcorder because of the camera’s better sensor; you get greater control over focus, aperture, depth of field, and white balance, and the variety of lenses you can use.
Software As stop-motion animation is little more than still images pieced together in a sequence, you can create a movie with any video application you like. And, for Mac users, that generally means iMovie ’09. However, while iMovie ’09 is affordable (particularly if it was bundled with your new Mac), there are tools better suited for the job.
Philipp Brendel’s free FrameByFrame is a bare-bones stop-motion animation application that works with a DV camcorder or iSight camera. It supports a form of onion skinning—a feature that displays a semi-transparent overlay of the last frame you shot along with the image of the object currently in front of the camera. Using onion skinning you can see how much you’ve moved the object in relation to its last position, thus helping to ensure that the movement between frames is neither too minimal or radical. FrameByFrame doesn’t support still cameras nor can it import still images.
Boinx Software makes three flavors of its capable stop-motion animation application, iStopMotion 2—Home ($49), Express ($99), and Pro ($499). The Home version lacks support for rotoscoping (used for lip syncing dialog) and soundtracks, and doesn’t allow continuous recording (shooting a user-defined number of frames or seconds of video) or offer noise reduction. Like the Home version, iStopMotion 2 Express doesn’t support HD video or provide integration with Final Cut Pro (). All versions include onion skinning, allow you to use both camcorders and supported still cameras, and include a compositing feature for adding background images and foreground frames.
D-Zed’s $275 Dragon Stop Motion is a professional stop-motion animation application. Although it can use camcorders for capturing images (including HDV/HDMI cameras in league with an HDMI conversion card), its strong suit is its support for still cameras. With it you can use the Live View feature found in recent Nikon, Canon, and Olympus DSLRs to not only preview shots through the camera’s lens, but also capture high-quality images. iStopMotion 2 also supports some DSLRs, but not as many as Dragon Stop Motion. It also includes such worthwhile features as onion skinning, an X-Sheet window (a technical script template) for plotting and annotating your shots, support for RAW camera files, and a dialog track for typing in phonetic symbols to help sync audio and motion.
FrameByFrame, iStopMotion 2, and Dragon Stop Motion let you trigger your camcorder and—in the case of the latter two applications, supported still camera—via the Mac’s keyboard or remote control. iStopMotion 2 additionally lets you use Apple’s hardware remote control (with Macs that support it) to trigger captures. D-Zed includes the Dragon Stop Motion Controller—a wired USB keypad—for controlling the software and performing camera captures. Both iStopMotion 2 and Dragon Stop Motion support time-lapse shooting, provide an on-screen grid so you can more carefully design your shots, and include a feature for adding and offsetting soundtracks.
Accessories A camera and the right software can be enough to get you started, but you’ll create better-looking projects with a few additional items. Start with a tripod. It’s vital that your camera stay in one place when you shoot a scene and a tripod can provide that service. If you’re animating small objects—clay figures, Lego, or toys—a desktop tripod will often do the trick.
Lights are another useful addition. Light changes over time and if you don’t control your primary light sources the quality of light within each shot will vary, making for an uneven looking video. You can inexpensively light your sets with a couple of tungsten work lights from your local Home Depot or Lowe’s. To cut down on harsh shadow, diffuse that light with a white bed sheet, white shower curtain, or sheet of diffusing material found at a photographic supply shop.
Alternatively you can use a couple of table lamps with daylight bulbs or purchase a small-object lighting kit such as American Recorder’s $130 Studio in a Box. Whether you choose work lights, daylight bulbs, or the lights in a lighting kit, adjust the white balance on your camera to find the setting that works best with the light you use.
Choosing a medium
Your stop-motion video will be mighty dull if you put nothing more interesting than a bare wall in front of the camera. Fortunately, you can animate just about anything.
Traditionalists will turn to modeling clay. It’s inexpensive and easily shaped. If you choose clay it’s a good idea to wrap it around a wire armature (skeleton). Tall clay objects tend to bend of their own accord (particularly when the clay is warm) and you don’t want to constantly twist something back into the correct posture between shots. The wire helps objects stay where you put them. You’re welcome to make your own but you can also purchase armature kits and parts from such companies as Animate Clay, Animation Supplies, Armaverse, and Skeletoon. Additionally, you can place small magnets in the feet of your armature and a thin steel plate in the stage’s floor to anchor your models.
When creating clay creatures that talk or use facial expressions, consider creating multiple parts—mouths, eyes, even heads—and swap them in when needed. For example, if your clay character speaks, you can form mouth parts that accompany “oo,” “ah,” “ee,” and plosive sounds (b’s and p’s). Record your dialog and then place the appropriate mouth shape to align with that dialog. Again, both iStopMotion 2 and Dragon Stop Motion include audio tracks for adding dialog.
Another popular medium is Lego blocks and characters. Lego offers a lot of advantages as it’s a relatively inexpensive material; there are a wide variety of shapes, pieces, and characters; you can work on a small “stage;” base plate pieces provide you with a “floor,” making it easy to attach your characters to a predictable surface (one where you always know where to place the characters’ next step); and because Lego is so recognizable, your audience will expect the animation to be a little wooden (and without animated expressions on the characters' faces).
If you’re a doodler, give paper and drawing or painting materials a try. Though some may define your effort as closer to a cartoon than stop-motion animation, the results can be spectacular (and inexpensive to produce).
Your subject need not be inanimate. Humans prove to be a perfectly good subject for stop-motion animation not only because they’re flexible in so many ways, but because you can tell them how to move. YouTube is full of stop-animation videos that feature human subjects.
Preparation
Although you can set up a camera, launch a stop-motion animation application, and start shoving Polly Pocket figures around on the dining room table, your video will be more compelling with some scenery and a story line.
Scenery will be determined by both the characters’ materials and their size. Human subjects are best shot in the real world. Clay characters can interact with the real world or be confined to a set you construct. Unless you have a lot of Lego, you’ll use a small set, much of which you can make out of Lego blocks.
When constructing a set, it’s worth the effort to create walls on the sides and back. This provides surfaces to bounce light off of and will lend depth to the scene when you place objects in the background. Additionally, you can line those surfaces with green paper or cloth, providing you with a green-screen background on which you can overlay pictures or movies in a video editing application that supports green screening.
You should also prepare a shooting script. Having a script in hand will not only ensure that you’ve thought through your story before you start shooting, but it will help you plan your shots. Look at any modern TV show or movie and you’ll find that the camera doesn’t linger on a character or angle for more than a handful of seconds. Your movie will look more professional when you shift angles every so often or move between long, medium, and close-up shots. All these movements should be planned and written out in a script that contains columns for action, dialog, camera position, and technical notes (“light from below,” for example).
When shooting from multiple angles and distances, you’ll find it easier if you use more than one camera. With multiple cameras you can leave each in place. With one camera there’s the danger that when you move it, you’ll be unable to return it to the exact position it was in originally. If you have just the one camera, carefully mark the position of the tripod—both where its legs stand and its height—so you have a better chance of putting it back in its original position.
Audio issues
If your video includes dialog, record it before you start capturing images. That way you can accurately form the character’s lips and mouth to match the words it speaks. Even if you’re animating Lego or stuffed animals—where moving mouths isn't a concern—you’ll find it much easier to pace your movie if you edit it to the dialog. Shooting first and then trying to cram the dialog into the correct spots can make the dialog sound unnatural.
You have more leeway with sound effects. With an audio editor that supports QuickTime (GarageBand, for example) you can easily add, edit, and position many sound effects after you’ve assembled the video.
Shooting
Before you take your first shot you have some important questions to answer: How smooth do you want the motion to be? How long do you intend the video to be? How much time and patience do you have? And how clearly have you observed the movement of “real” objects?
Considering frame-rate Motion pictures are shot at 24 frames per second (fps). Full-motion video is approximately 30 fps. The Wallace and Gromit 30-minute shorts were shot at close to 20 fps—around 35,000 shots per video. That’s a lot of pictures. Unless you’re a professional with a staff to do the grunt work or have nearly endless amounts of time on your hands, you need to find ways to take fewer shots.
One way, obviously, is to make shorter videos. Another is to choose a lower frame rate. 15 fps looks reasonably smooth, but that’s still a lot of pictures. Because viewers expect stop-motion animation to be jerky, putting together a movie at 10 or 12 fps is hardly a sin.
If you’re importing images into iMovie ’09, you don’t have much choice as the shortest value you can assign to a still image is 0.1 seconds. FrameByFrame, iStopMotion 2, and Dragon Stop Motion, however, allow you to set the frame rate you like.
Power Whether you use a DV camcorder or DSLR, your camera will be switched on for long periods of time, which will drain the battery and eventually leave you in a powerless lurch. You’ll be able to shoot as long as you like if you forego the battery as a power source and instead attach an AC adapter to your camera.
Also, if you use a DV camcorder, that camcorder may go to sleep after a few minutes of inactivity. You can often prevent this by taking the tape out of the camera.
Unlike the software developed for Windows system, most of the applications installed in Mac OS X generally can be removed with relative ease. Stop Motion Studio 1.5.5 is a third party application that provides additional functionality to OS X system and enjoys a popularity among Mac users. However, instead of installing it by dragging its icon to the Application folder, uninstalling Stop Motion Studio 1.5.5 may need you to do more than a simple drag-and-drop to the Trash.
Download Mac App RemoverWhen installed, Stop Motion Studio 1.5.5 creates files in several locations. Generally, its additional files, such as preference files and application support files, still remains on the hard drive after you delete Stop Motion Studio 1.5.5 from the Application folder, in case that the next time you decide to reinstall it, the settings of this program still be kept. But if you are trying to uninstall Stop Motion Studio 1.5.5 in full and free up your disk space, removing all its components is highly necessary. Continue reading this article to learn about the proper methods for uninstalling Stop Motion Studio 1.5.5.
Manually uninstall Stop Motion Studio 1.5.5 step by step:
Most applications in Mac OS X are bundles that contain all, or at least most, of the files needed to run the application, that is to say, they are self-contained. Thus, different from the program uninstall method of using the control panel in Windows, Mac users can easily drag any unwanted application to the Trash and then the removal process is started. Despite that, you should also be aware that removing an unbundled application by moving it into the Trash leave behind some of its components on your Mac. To fully get rid of Stop Motion Studio 1.5.5 from your Mac, you can manually follow these steps:
1. Terminate Stop Motion Studio 1.5.5 process(es) via Activity Monitor
Before uninstalling Stop Motion Studio 1.5.5, you’d better quit this application and end all its processes. If Stop Motion Studio 1.5.5 is frozen, you can press Cmd +Opt + Esc, select Stop Motion Studio 1.5.5 in the pop-up windows and click Force Quit to quit this program (this shortcut for force quit works for the application that appears but not for its hidden processes).
Open Activity Monitor in the Utilities folder in Launchpad, and select All Processes on the drop-down menu at the top of the window. Select the process(es) associated with Stop Motion Studio 1.5.5 in the list, click Quit Process icon in the left corner of the window, and click Quit in the pop-up dialog box (if that doesn’t work, then try Force Quit).
2. Delete Stop Motion Studio 1.5.5 application using the Trash
First of all, make sure to log into your Mac with an administrator account, or you will be asked for a password when you try to delete something.
Open the Applications folder in the Finder (if it doesn’t appear in the sidebar, go to the Menu Bar, open the “Go” menu, and select Applications in the list), search for Stop Motion Studio 1.5.5 application by typing its name in the search field, and then drag it to the Trash (in the dock) to begin the uninstall process. Alternatively you can also click on the Stop Motion Studio 1.5.5 icon/folder and move it to the Trash by pressing Cmd + Del or choosing the File and Move to Trash commands.
For the applications that are installed from the App Store, you can simply go to the Launchpad, search for the application, click and hold its icon with your mouse button (or hold down the Option key), then the icon will wiggle and show the “X” in its left upper corner. Click the “X” and click Delete in the confirmation dialog.
Download Mac App Remover3. Remove all components related to Stop Motion Studio 1.5.5 in Finder
Though Stop Motion Studio 1.5.5 has been deleted to the Trash, its lingering files, logs, caches and other miscellaneous contents may stay on the hard disk. For complete removal of Stop Motion Studio 1.5.5, you can manually detect and clean out all components associated with this application. You can search for the relevant names using Spotlight. Those preference files of Stop Motion Studio 1.5.5 can be found in the Preferences folder within your user’s library folder (~/Library/Preferences) or the system-wide Library located at the root of the system volume (/Library/Preferences/), while the support files are located in '~/Library/Application Support/' or '/Library/Application Support/'.
Open the Finder, go to the Menu Bar, open the “Go” menu, select the entry:|Go to Folder... and then enter the path of the Application Support folder:~/Library
Search for any files or folders with the program’s name or developer’s name in the ~/Library/Preferences/, ~/Library/Application Support/ and ~/Library/Caches/ folders. Right click on those items and click Move to Trash to delete them.
Meanwhile, search for the following locations to delete associated items:
- /Library/Preferences/
- /Library/Application Support/
- /Library/Caches/
Besides, there may be some kernel extensions or hidden files that are not obvious to find. In that case, you can do a Google search about the components for Stop Motion Studio 1.5.5. Usually kernel extensions are located in in /System/Library/Extensions and end with the extension .kext, while hidden files are mostly located in your home folder. You can use Terminal (inside Applications/Utilities) to list the contents of the directory in question and delete the offending item.
4. Empty the Trash to fully remove Stop Motion Studio 1.5.5
If you are determined to delete Stop Motion Studio 1.5.5 permanently, the last thing you need to do is emptying the Trash. To completely empty your trash can, you can right click on the Trash in the dock and choose Empty Trash, or simply choose Empty Trash under the Finder menu (Notice: you can not undo this act, so make sure that you haven’t mistakenly deleted anything before doing this act. If you change your mind, before emptying the Trash, you can right click on the items in the Trash and choose Put Back in the list). In case you cannot empty the Trash, reboot your Mac.
Download Mac App RemoverTips for the app with default uninstall utility:
You may not notice that, there are a few of Mac applications that come with dedicated uninstallation programs. Though the method mentioned above can solve the most app uninstall problems, you can still go for its installation disk or the application folder or package to check if the app has its own uninstaller first. If so, just run such an app and follow the prompts to uninstall properly. After that, search for related files to make sure if the app and its additional files are fully deleted from your Mac.
Automatically uninstall Stop Motion Studio 1.5.5 with MacRemover (recommended):
No doubt that uninstalling programs in Mac system has been much simpler than in Windows system. But it still may seem a little tedious and time-consuming for those OS X beginners to manually remove Stop Motion Studio 1.5.5 and totally clean out all its remnants. Why not try an easier and faster way to thoroughly remove it?
If you intend to save your time and energy in uninstalling Stop Motion Studio 1.5.5, or you encounter some specific problems in deleting it to the Trash, or even you are not sure which files or folders belong to Stop Motion Studio 1.5.5, you can turn to a professional third-party uninstaller to resolve troubles. Here MacRemover is recommended for you to accomplish Stop Motion Studio 1.5.5 uninstall within three simple steps. MacRemover is a lite but powerful uninstaller utility that helps you thoroughly remove unwanted, corrupted or incompatible apps from your Mac. Now let’s see how it works to complete Stop Motion Studio 1.5.5 removal task.
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1. Download MacRemover and install it by dragging its icon to the application folder.
2. Launch MacRemover in the dock or Launchpad, select Stop Motion Studio 1.5.5 appearing on the interface, and click Run Analysis button to proceed.
3. Review Stop Motion Studio 1.5.5 files or folders, click Complete Uninstall button and then click Yes in the pup-up dialog box to confirm Stop Motion Studio 1.5.5 removal.
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The whole uninstall process may takes even less than one minute to finish, and then all items associated with Stop Motion Studio 1.5.5 has been successfully removed from your Mac!
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Benefits of using MacRemover:
MacRemover has a friendly and simply interface and even the first-time users can easily operate any unwanted program uninstallation. With its unique Smart Analytic System, MacRemover is capable of quickly locating every associated components of Stop Motion Studio 1.5.5 and safely deleting them within a few clicks. Thoroughly uninstalling Stop Motion Studio 1.5.5 from your mac with MacRemover becomes incredibly straightforward and speedy, right? You don’t need to check the Library or manually remove its additional files. Actually, all you need to do is a select-and-delete move. As MacRemover comes in handy to all those who want to get rid of any unwanted programs without any hassle, you’re welcome to download it and enjoy the excellent user experience right now!
This article provides you two methods (both manually and automatically) to properly and quickly uninstall Stop Motion Studio 1.5.5, and either of them works for most of the apps on your Mac. If you confront any difficulty in uninstalling any unwanted application/software, don’t hesitate to apply this automatic tool and resolve your troubles.