Stop Motion Set up with FCP 5

[Paul Escandon]

You can get a live feed by hooking up a DV camera up via firewire and opening up the log and capture window. You can do a quick capture now to grab video from your feed (it will be more than 1 frame but that shouldn’t be a problem). Make sure the device control preset is set to non controllable device or else the capturing might not work as it will be waiting for timecode.

There might be other tools to grab single frames from firewire but since this is an FCP forum that’s the only way I know to do it from FCP.

* * *
Paul Escandon – Lead Editor @ Outdoor Channel
Producer | Director – Oremus Productions
http://www.oremusproductions.com
Apple Certified Trainer – Final Cut Pro
Adjunct Professor of Media – JPCU
—
MacPro Quad-core XEON
8Gb ram, ATI Radeon X1900 XT, 2TB internal RAID
2 20″ Dell UltraSharps + Matrox MXO & 23″ ACD

[April Suen]

Hey Paul,

Thanks for the response. I tried it and it worked with the live feed. Is there an efficient way to set each logged clip to 1 second still frame so I can keep it consistent?

Thanks!

April

[Paul Escandon]

There is no way that I know of to do this from within Final Cut using this method, unfortunately.

* * *
Paul Escandon – Lead Editor @ Outdoor Channel
Producer | Director – Oremus Productions
http://www.oremusproductions.com
Apple Certified Trainer – Final Cut Pro
Adjunct Professor of Media – JPCU
—
MacPro Quad-core XEON
8Gb ram, ATI Radeon X1900 XT, 2TB internal RAID
2 20″ Dell UltraSharps + Matrox MXO & 23″ ACD

[April Suen]

Thanks for the tips. I basically captured as fast I could and then reduced the speed.

Cheers!

[David Bogie]

Easiest way to shoot stop motion animation for editing on FCP is with a digital single lens reflex camera. Import the stil limages as an image sequence into Motion, set your number of frames per frame. Motion willsave it as a movie. QT Pro will also import a folder of properly numbered stills.

Stop motion animation is more than100 years old, there is nothing that hasn’t been log perfected in the mediu,.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[Mark Raudonis]

I agree with Mr. Bogie on this one.

Use a digital SLR, then just import the still frames in a sequence.

Another advantage to this approach over the “live camera to FCP”, is the resolution of your basic cheap digital camera is approx 5-10 times that of even HD! Therefore, you can reframe or do moves in post that would be impossible if you brought in the “live image” at even HD resolution.

I’ve done a fair amount of “time lapse” photography using this workflow and the results are astounding, considering how cheap the cameras are compared to a true HD motion camera.

Mark

[Alan Lacey]

Just don’t go buggering your Nikon DX2s shutter/mirror by taking thousands of frames! That’s one very expensive repair.

Alan

[Uli Plank]

They should be good for hundreds of thousands. I’ve shot time-lapse on a relatively cheap Canon S45 amounting to about 160,000 frames by now – it’s still alive…

For stop-motion animation there’s an excellent program called iStopMotion from http://www.boinx.com .

Regards,

Uli

Director of the Institute of Media Research (IMF) at Braunschweig University of Arts

[Alan Lacey]

Wow Uli that’s testament to the camera’s construction, is it an SLR and do you let the mirror flip every time?

Alan

[Uli Plank]

No, this is no SLR, but it has a mechanical shutter. Some companies, like Nikon, are quoting lifetimes for their SLR’s mirror mechanics, and the numbers are pretty high.

Anyway, a collegue in Berlin has done lots of commercial time-lapse with his Canon 20D and it’s still doing well.

Regards,

Uli

Director of the Institute of Media Research (IMF) at Braunschweig University of Arts