I'm confused about the 140 frames. According to the manual for my Sony, frame recording goes in steps of about six frames.

Tor

Tors, it probably depends on the make/model of the camera. When i press the "Still photo" button on my Panasonic PVDV-900 it records for about 7.5 seconds, or about 225 frames.

Lots of good information in the previous posts. One thing you might want to consider is using a tool that will help you with the job. While doing this with a digital still camera can be fun, it can also be very frustrating when you start to put it all together and see that the changes from shot to shot don’t flow seamlessly. I’ve done this with my son and having software that lets you preview the images with “onion skinning” makes it much easier. That will give you a ghost overlay of what the last scene looked like to help line up the next scene and determine how much motion to apply to the characters you’re animating.

Take a look at software like Anasazi Stop Motion Animator 1.1 (freeware), Stop Motion Pro (www.stopmotionpro.com) $98 after 45% school discount, or Animator DV Simple 8.1 (animatordv.wmmedia.com) $49. All of these will do onion skinning but they require a video camera. You could use something as simple as a $49 web cam. The video camera is not taking any pictures; it’s just being used as a lens. The pictures are captured in the software directly to your hard drive. In most cases they capture in AVI format so you’ll just have one file to drop on the Vegas timeline and add music, voiceovers, etc. I’ve even done stop motion on a blue poster board background and chroma keyed in a live video background with Vegas.

As some have suggested, do your animations at 15 frames per second. Don’t try and fill 29.97fps. Do 15 and just double it to 29.97 with software like Vegas that can interpolate between frames. That will cut the number of images you need to take in half! Actually the version you want to show on the web should remain at 15fps to cut down on bandwidth.

Stop motion can be a lot of fun. Fighting with your equipment isn’t. Getting some stop motion software can be a big help and move the process along more quickly. I’m really happy to hear you doing this with elementary school kids. They are so imaginative. I did this with my son and some of his friends when he was in the 4th grade and they just had a blast coming up with ideas. Go for it!

~jr

Oh, so very cool! As soon as the kids leave this afternoon, I'm going to find and play with the software that you suggested!!! Anything that will make this project easier would be terrific! Going to go teach now!

Sorry,

www.vcdeasy.org.

David

Thanks for the tip on Anasazi Stop Motion Animator JR. I think... Don't really *need* another project at the moment, but it does bring up some interesting hybrid possibilities.

Also stumbled across this http://www.pacinfo.com/~handley/claymation.html that might have an useful idea or 3 in the classroom

luck
mike

Here it is ... the new Lego Castle video.

http://www.chienworks.com/media/lego-castle-1-square.wmv

It's about 5MB and 1:41 long. Please don't mind the audio. I wasn't feeling particularly aurally creative.

Over 3000 shots. Interesting. Nice design, too.

So cool! I'm going to show this to my class! The flickering is minimal and the timing is great! S0-- help.

1. What kind of camera are you using and with what settings?

2. Are you using a remote control to take the pictures to eliminate shaking?

3. What timing are you using for frames per second? etc.

4. How are you rendering this so that it doesn't take up goo goobs of space?

5. And are you using VV or the Media Studio software that you used to make the other castle videos?

Thanks for the help---again!!!!! I appreciate this forum so much!!!!

SMiles,
Debbie

Debbie, thanks!

I had two very steady lights (overhead room light and desk lamp) with very little else moving in the room (yes, i sat almost motionless for 3 hours). About the only movement other than the Lego pieces were my cats occasionally jumping up on or getting down from the couch, which is the backdrop. You can see the towel slowly "unfalling". The piece was filmed backwards (i built the castle first, then disassembled it frame by frame), so the towel was actually falling bit by bit each time a cat jumped on it. Oops.

1. My camera is a Panasonic MiniDV, model PV-DV900, connected to the computer through firewire. It has no manual exposure control, but the scene changed very little so this didn't matter. I did hit the backlight switch to correct for the white background. Manual focusing was used to prevent autofocus from messing it up. I could just as easily have used my Intel webcam, but the picture wouldn't have been as clear and sharp. (The original .avi file is crystal clear; most of the blurriness is WMV compression.)

2. I used SonicFoundry VidCap 3.0 for the capturing. I had the keyboard in my lap and typed Ctrl-Shift-R, Enter for each frame, which were stored as sequential .jpg files.

3. Timing is 15/second. This was set in the properties screen in Still Image Sequence import in Vegas.

4. I rendered to Windows Media Video 8, 1Mbps template. The tweaks i used were to set the frame rate there to 15 (the default is 30, so every other frame would have been a duplicate and therefore a waste), Enable two pass encoding, and sliding the Quality slider all the way to the right. I also set the project & frame size to 320x320, but that's because i wanted a square frame and you might want to keep the standard rectangular size.

5. Exclusive of the title scene, this was done entirely with SonicFoundry software. VidCap was used to capture the images, SoundForge was used to synthesize the noise sound that was imported into ACID to create the audio track, Vegas was used to import & reverse the animation, assemble the whole project, and render it. Most of the title screen was produced in Vegas as well, except for the rotating cat head which was made in Micrografx Simply 3D 2.

Wcoxe1, thank you too! Actually it was only about 1370 images. It's at 15fps, not 29.97.

Is it a digital camcorder? I'm assuming so since you have a firewire card????

What is SonicFoundry VidCap 3.0?????

Perhaps I should be using a camcorder and SF VidCap instead of the digital still Nikon Coolpix 4300 and the VV 3.0????? What do you think?

My VV came in a bundle with Acid and Sound Forge, but I haven't figured them out yet.

Thanks,
Deb

Yes, it is a camcorder, but i'm only using it for stills in this situation. VidCap is the Video Capture program that comes as part of Vegas. In the media pool window, click on the little camcorder icon to launch it. It allows you to capture both video and stills, and also has a print-to-tape feature to send your finished video back to tape.

Any camera should work pretty well. It's probably essential that you do have a remote for it though. If you're pressing the shutter release button on the camera you may be shaking it every time.

If I hook my Canon G2 digicam up to the computer via USB (I have drivers installed), will VidCap be able to see that or is it firewire only.