Ever wanted to use your digital video camera and iMovie to do stop-motion photography? Now’s your chance, thanks to GeBE Computer & Peripherie GmbH’s “Last Minute Christmas Release” of iStopMotion.
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Stop-motion photography is an old technique used by filmmakers to animate clay creatures and other objects in movies. Used since the silent film days, stop-motion photography remained popular for decades until computer animation and digital compositing became inexpensive and ubiquitous. Fans of the technique were delighted this past year to see stop-motion photography used again with Lego construction bricks in The White Stripes’ music video for their popular single “Fell in Love with a Girl.”
iStopMotion provides an interface for you to capture stop-motion photography with your Mac and digital camera. Java-based, the software has been tested with Mac OS X 10.2 and QuickTime 6. GeBe said that iStopMotion should work with any QuickTime-compatible FireWire-based DV cam and some USB Webcams as well. The software can export a stream of images to DV format for further editing and refinement using iMovie or other DV-compatible video editing applications.
The new software is being offered as a free “pre-preview release,” and GeBe CEO Oliver Breidenbach admits that it “is by no means a polished product.” His company felt now was the right time to debut it publicly, to help refine the further development of the product.