The purchase of said laptop did set us back a little as far as spending money goes, so I won't be able to get any of the higher-end capture software for a while. That's ok. I read a few reviews and did a little price hunting on some of the lower-end titles. Last month we got The Pirates! on Blu-ray (which is fantastic, by the way), and it came with a flyer about some kid oriented stop-motion software from Aardman called Animate It!. I played a little with the trial version, and decided it had enough features to keep me entertained. The full downloadable version only cost about $31 through PayPal, and installed faster than anything else I've put on this machine so far.
The software is extremely simple. There aren't a ton of features to play with. However, it does work quite well. It has live onion-skinning, live chroma key, a handful of camera settings, and import and time-lapse features. It appears to be able to make use of any connected or built-in camera instantly, without having to do any fancy kind of setup. You can adjust the frame rate, drag and drop frames with ease, and even add an audio track. I haven't encountered any bugs in it yet, though I've only played with it for an afternoon. There are limited save formats, but what's there is pretty standard.
What I like best about the software so far is honestly just the onion-skin feature. Now, I haven't played around with other capture software for a long time, nor have I gotten to use the newest Lunchbox DV. Perhaps it's just me, but the flashing back and forth on the Lunchbox Sync and with other software I've tried always bothered me. Maybe my eyes are too sensitive. Maybe I only tried crappy software a long time ago. I don't know. But with Animate It!, it has true onion-skinning, and you can even adjust the opacity of either the previous or current frame. There's a few different playback modes available while taking frames that work with the onion-skinning. Another nifty feature I hope to have fun with is the live chroma key. Not only can you use an eyedropper tool to pick what color you want to key out of the live feed, you can adjust the opacity and tolerance on the fly.
While I didn't produce anything spectacular today, I did have a bit of fun. I learned a bit about the software, the Acrobot figure I was trying to animate, and the kitchen. The software is more than adequate for simple stuff. The Acrobot figure rather sucks, doesn't move well, and the joints like to slip. The kitchen floor also creaks enough to knock a camera off a stand and a magnetic figure off the fridge if you step in just the wrong place. But hey, them's the breaks. I got to do a tiny bit of play animation this afternoon, and that's what matters at the moment.
Nice! Never heard of Animate it. Are you using clay figures to test?
ReplyDeleteIt's fairly new, apparently. Absolutely geared towards kids, but very usable. That's fine, though... I'm an active volunteer with Girl Scouts, so that'll be just one more great activity I can easily share with them.
Deletehttp://www.animate-it.com/
Right now, I'm just using toys and other objects. I'll probably break out the clay soon, though.