iStopMotion is a tool for recording single frames from a video source or digital still camera.
When saved in sequence, these single frames turn into a movie. This is called stop motion or
stop frame animation and is the oldest special effect used in film. It is the easiest way to
make a movie at school or at home and it remains a popular special effect technique among
professionals.

What's new in iStopMotion 2?

Although some customers told us that iStopMotion 1 was pretty close to perfect, version 2
improves on a lot of things:

New Workflow.
Creating a new document now immediately creates a new movie. The two most obvious advantages
are that saving movies is practically instantaneous. Combined with the new Autosave option your
valuable work should be safe at all times. Presets. Convenient, customizable presets help you get
started quicker. Presets can be inspected and created via the preferences window. Export.
No more need to figure out challenging QuickTime dialogs. Presets already contain matching
export settings. Live video recording. In addition to single frames for traditional animation you
now may capture a certain number of seconds, e.g. a zoom, in real time, even in HD if you have a
fast enough disk. Full support for aspect ratio settings in input sources and movies. Rotoscoping/
Lip-Synching. You may import an image or a movie as a reference for your animation and observe it
in various ways. Compositing. Import images or movies for putting them behind or in front of your
recording. Foreground objects need to have transparent areas (represented by an alpha channel) in
order to still see the recording. When using background media, the source feed will be chroma-keyed.
Shortcuts. There are a lot more shortcuts to be controlled via keyboard or speech, all of them are
fully customizable. Check the Shortcuts preference pane for details. Literally hundreds of big and
small improvements. See for yourself. Of course we have also reworked the UI quite a bit to
accomodate all these new features and to give iStopMotion a fresh new look.

What do you need

A PowerPC or Intel Mac with Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" or newer
A compatible capture source such as a FireWire DV Cam, IIDC Firewire camera, Firewire Webcams
(like Apple external or built-in iSight), a supported USB cam, a capture card such as Blackmagic
Intensity or a supported digital still camera.
A note on digital still cameras: iStopMotion uses the Apple Image Capture Framework to import and
capture images from digital still cameras. There are two levels of support: remotely capturing
images and downloading images from the camera. Please download the iStopMotion demo and use the
built-in assistant to test what level your camera supports and if you like it before you buy.
For more information and a list of supported cameras please visit the website.

Download File Size:22.72 MB

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