Welcome

A compilation of Animator Terry Ibele's work in stop motion animation and claymation

Thursday, February 24, 2011

Platypus 2 Shot 1 & 2

Well, I learned a lesson with my new camera and Dragon stop motion software today. After I capture a frame on Dragon, the camera then takes its own picture and uploads it to a high-res file; there's about a 3 second delay between the two.

So, after I thought everything was all fine and dandy with the two shots I just made, I exported the high-res image sequence and, well, just look at what happened:

Although, I think that the firefeets turned out pretty swell! Anyways, it's back to reshooting them again!

I've been using a free trial of Dragon Stop Motion software (http://www.dragonstopmotion.com/), and have found it to be pretty good. Here's my review:

Pros:
-you can onionskin your live feed with frames you just shot
-you can easily playback the frames you just shot including your live feed
-you can easily delete frames
-you can draw on your screen to help with markers and measurements
-all the functions have hotkeys on your numbpad


Cons:
-you cannot link (at least I haven't discovered how yet) different takes together to see how it flows. You need to do this in an external program, like AfterEffects
-it always takes a few seconds of waiting after you capture a shot for the program to catch up (could just be my computer??)
-the program creates about 5 folders for each frame you take: 2 low res file folders, each with a slightly higher res folder inside and finally a very high res folder. IT'S VERY CONFUSING!

Also, if you download the free trial, it only lets you take 50 frames at a time, so be careful!


UPDATE:
Here are the two shots redone:

4 comments:

  1. After reading your experience with Dragon, it's no wonder I hated it so much. lol. It's just not simple...

    You have a little flicker in there, you in manual exposure mode?

    ReplyDelete
  2. I think the flicker is due to the lamp I'm using. I've always had trouble with that lamp, but I can't seem to find my other one after I moved :(

    ReplyDelete
  3. This is looking great so far :D I really love the smoothness of your characters. And in the last post the little bob in the hair was (I thought) an intentional cute detail haha not an error. Anyways, can’t wait to see the whole thing together.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thanks Crystal.
    The bob was actually intentional, I just didn't think it turned out all that great so I'm going to take it out

    ReplyDelete