iStopMotion 2 Home edition: Bring Out Your Inner Gumby

No matter how good computer graphics and animation gets, there's something fascinating about watching normally inanimate or extremely slow moving objects and animating them. Anyone who watches Gumby, Wallace and Gromit, any time lapsed video, or one of the classic movies with Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion film effects knows what I mean. Except for a couple of animated GIF images back in the dark ages of the web, I really haven't tried my hand at stop-motion animation. But, iStopMotion 2 Home edition gave me an easy way to try my hand at it. BTW, the Boing Software site shows a $49 price for the Home edition. But, the Apple store lists it at $39.95.

iStopMotion works with the built-in iSight camera (for iMacs and various MacBook versions). However, that is a pretty limiting proposition. So, I attached my low-end MiniDV camcorder via Firewire. You can see one of my first stop motion video attempts below.

I spent a bit of time puzzling over some of the initial configuration choices such as the movie resolution and frame rate. After connecting my MiniDV camcorder, iStopMotion displayed a small warning icon for my Pixel Aspect Ratio. It defaulted to 4:3. However, my camera apparently has a 1:1 ratio since setting it to square made the warning go away. Some settings (like Noise Reduction) are not available in the Home edition.

Taking the still images is the simple part. You can choose either an automatic time-lapse or click the red capture button to record a still image anytime you want. iStopMotion provides an overlay display so you can see a ghostly image of the previous still image to help line up objects.

I also tried bringing in a series of digital photos. I took the photos while sitting in the passenger seat of a car. I just opened the window and shot a continuous series of 53 photos. You can see the result below. If you get queasy when watching jumpy handheld video recordings, you might want to avoid watching this video :-)

Some things just work better as a regular video recording :-)

iStopMotion writes out the video directly for you. You don't need to process it through iMovie or any other video editor. However, it does not provide titling. So, if you want to do that, you do need to use a video editor.

The biggest problem with iStopMotion is that it is way too much fun for people like me who don't actually have any serious projects to apply it. I spent way too much time stop-motion-doodling with it over the past three day weekend. And, I suspect, more than a few productive hours will be spent noodling around with iStopMotion in the future.

There are two higher-end editions in addition to the starter Home version I used: The Express Edition is priced at $99 and adds features such as custom project presets, adding a soundtrack (I used iMovie to do that in my sample), rotoscope/lip-syncing, and noise reduction. The Pro edition is priced at $499 and adds Final Cut Pro integration and eliminates the output resolution limit.