Stopmotion user manual
Contents
1. Troubleshooting 12 1 The program tells me it can t import images Have you checked that 1 The camera is working in Linux and the driver is properly set up 2 No other programs are using the camera 3 The program used for importing pictures and video is installed and working See the preferences menu CTRL P 142. done through the configure menu Settings Configure Stopmotion Ctrl P and you can either choose from one of the predefined settings or create your own Stopmotion user manual Figure 8 The Video Import config menu 7 stopmotion kill 4 ps ax grep wgrabij grep v grep cut b 0 5 Image importing in Stopmotion works by continously asking an external program to grab a picture from the camera and place it in the stopmotion directory Stopmotion then displays this picture and when this is done continously you get live video If you want to add a new import program you can do this by pressing the Add button A new row appears in the table and you can fill in a name for your setting and a short description You then have to specify the command line options to import pictures These can be set by selecting your setting and pressing the Edit button There are three things which can be specified here The prepoll start deamon and stop deamon fields If the program for importing the images grabs one image and then exits you can leave the start and stop deamon fields blank The contents of the prepoll field is a command which is run before importing a picture If the import program is running in the foreground this will typically be the command line for grabbing the picture Note that you have to write DEFAULTPATH in the command line on the place you otherwise would have speciefied the path to the file where the image shoul
3. Stopmotion user manual Fredrik Berg Kjoelstad Bjoern Erik Nilsen Sunday 14 April 2005 1 What is Stopmotion Where can get it Stopmotion is a program for creating stop motion animation movies from pictures you already have on your harddrive and from pictures you import live from a webcamera A stop motion animation is an animation which is built by taking many pictures of some object while moving it a little between each picture When these pictures are run you get an animation You can download the lates version of Stopmotion from the Stopmotion webpage http developer skolelinux no info studentgrupper 2005 hig stopmotion index htm 2 Getting started Once you have installed Stopmotion you can start it by typing stopmotion in a console or from menues Inthe KDE menues you can Stopmotion it by going to Edutainment Teaching Tools Stopmotion Inthe Debian menues Stopmotion lies under Apps Education Stopmotion When the program is started you will se the following Stopmotion user manual Figure 1 Stopmotion at startup Stopmotion j j File Edit Settings Help E F E E H H P H H ii E gh FPS chooser 10 Frame rurniber To the top you have the Framebar where you will see all the pictures in the animation The center area is the Frameview where you will get a closer look at your pictures see the webcamera and preview your animation The left area is the tools menu On t
4. d be stord Stopmotion Stopmotion user manual will replace this tag with the correct path and file name If the program you use for importing the pictures is running as a background deamon process you have to specify command lines for starting and stoping the deamon Again you should use the importpath tag instead of the path to the file se above Prepoll could still be used but is not required One potential use for the prepoll command when the grab program is running as a deamon process is to specify a command line which performes a operation such as scaling or rotating the picture This command will be called on the pictures every time before importing them meaning the live video will be displayed with the effect 7 Adding sound You also can add sound to your animations Before you can do this however you need to have a frame to attatch the sound to Therefore you should add some frames from the harddrive or webcamera first When you have one or more frames you can add a sound by double clicking with the mouse on the frame to attatch the sound to You will then get a menu where you can add sounds When running the animation the sound will be played from this frame and until the sound is completed or the animation is at an end Note The only currently supported sound format is ogg 8 Exporting to video By now you should have a nice animation of your own It s time to make a video file of it The first thing you need to do is to in
5. een frames H J H L and scenes H H O as well as changing the speed of the animation preview frames per second Note The camera has to be off to use this menu 5 Using Stopmotion with your webcamera The real value of using Stopmotion lies in working directly against a webcamera Stopmotion user manual If you have a webcamera that works on your linux distribution and vgrabbj installed you can start the I camera by pressing the a C button If not you can go to the the next section Changing the import settings to set up your camera correctly Figure 4 The Camera menu Stopmotion File Edit Settings Help Note For this to work you have to turn of all other programs using the webcamera When the camera is on you have three modes for viewing the video These modes have different purposes and are there to assist you in creating your animations Stopmotion user manual Image mixing Onionskinning Shortcut 1 The image mixing is probably the view mode you will be using the most This mode allows you to view previous pictures up to five on top of the camera This way you can position the figure in relation to the previous frames so that you can create smooth motions Figure 5 The onionskinning mixing mode Be Ede feinga Help Frame umher 2 You can change the number of pictures to view on top of the camera with the Number of mixes slider on the camera panel Image diff
6. erentiation Shortcut 2 The image differentiation mode is primarly meant as a tool for moving the figure back to a previous position It displays the difference between the selected frame and the camera This way if an object in front off the camera has been involountairly moved fallen etc you can use the differentiation mode Stopmotion user manual together with the image mixing to move the object back to its previous position This can be done by moving the figure until the picture is black which means the selected frame and the camera are equal Figure 6 The differentiation mode Fle Ede fmin Help 1 E BS FFE cher Frame number J Playback Shortcut 3 The playback mode will continously run the the already recorded frames as an animation with the input from the camera as the final frame This way you can see the camera input which will become the next frame together with the previous frames as an animation Stopmotion user manual Figure 7 The playback mode oto prembiom Cee iimiviividiaidaiiiani You can specify how many frame backwards that should be played up to 50 with the Number of images slider on the camera panel and you can set how fast they should played with the FPS chooser on the preview panel 6 Changing the import settings If the video importing doesn t work or if you want other settings you can change the way video is imported in Stopmotion This is
7. he top of this menu you have buttons for adding pictures from the O E harddrive he adding new scenes as well as deleting frames and scenes E ej You can i also start the webcamera with the camera button E 3 Adding pictures The next step is to try adding some pictures from the harddrive You can do this by clicking on the me Ctrl F button Stopmotion user manual You will get the following dialog where you can select the pictures to add to the project Figure 2 The Add frames dialog Choose frames to add B eae O0009 png j 00014 png _ 90000 png Lj 00010 png _ 00020 png H0011 png M LA pri J C 00003 png TERTIA J 00023 png C oooo4 png EUERE 00024 png 90015 png 1J 00006 png 7 00016 png _ 00007 png 00017 png 4 00008 png 00018 png File name File type When you have selected some pictures you can click on the Open button and the pictures will be added to the project as frames 4 Running previewing the animation Now that you have added some test pictures to your animations wouldn t you like to run them as an animation Stopmotion allows you to preview your animation before exporting it This can be done through the play panel Stopmotion user manual Figure 3 The Run Animation menu t Stopmotion The play panel allows you to play d K and stop E the running of the animation You can also move betw
8. ion Tell your friends Il Stopmotion user manual 9 Using Stopmotion together with other programs Stopmotion supports drag and drop and you can drag pictures to and from the desktop or other programs One especially useful example of using Stopmotion with other programs is to use gimp or another painting program to add effects to the frames Figure 10 Adding effects with gimp snp 2 pet 0 AGE lig doa jajaj PP ia PAPIET ca PETEN ka Pe ra ira The best way to do this is to drag a frame picture from Stopmotion to gimp Change around with it in gimp then save the picture in gimp File Save Ctrl S not save as Stopmotion should detect the changes automatically provided you have FAM File Alteration Monitor installed but if it doesn t you can switch to Stopmotion and when you select the frame picture in the framebar it will be updated to the altered picture 12 Stopmotion user manual 10 Getting access to the image files in your animation If you want access to the image files in your animation project you can open the project sto file in your file browser The file is a tarball file and inside it you will find the images in the images directory 11 Shortcut keys Table 1 General shortcuts Ctrl N Creates a New project Ctrl O Opens an excisting project Ctrl S Saves the project Ctrl Shift S Saves the project as Ctrl Alt V Opens a dialog to export the
9. project as video Ctrl Alt C Opens a dialog to export the project as a Cinerella project Ctrl Q Quits the application Ctrl Z Undoes the last action Ctrl Shift Z Redoes the last undo Ctrl X Cuts the selected frames out of the animation and places them on the global clipboard Ctrl C Copies the selected frames to the global clipboard Ctrl V Paste pictures from the global clipboard and add them to the animation after the selected frame Ctrl G Brings up a menu where you can select a frame to jump to Ctrl P Opens the import and export preferences menu Shift F1 Gives you a whatsthis arrow for querying information about a user interface item Ctrl F Add one or several frames pictures to the animation Ctrl E Create a new scene Delete Deletes the selected frames Shift Delete Deletes the selected scene A Selects all the frames in the opened scene Table 2 Play shortcuts 13 Stopmotion user manual P K Play the animation Right L Go to the next frame Left J Go to the previous frame O Go to the next scene I Go to the previous scene Ctrl L Toggle whether the animation should loop when playing Table 3 Camera shortcuts C Start the camera Space Capture a frame from the camera video stream 1 Switch to image mixing onionskinning mode 2 Switch to image differentation mode 3 Switch to playback mode 12
10. stall an video encoder If you have mplayer installed you should already have one you can use Go to the Configure menu Settings Configure Stopmotion Ctrl P and press the Video Export tab You should now get a list of video export settings 10 Stopmotion user manual Figure 9 The Video Export menu tE stopmotion Video Import Video Export Below you can set which program proacess stopmotion should use for encoding the currently active project to a video file You can use IMAGEPATH to represent the image path absolute path to the directory where the images can be found You should always use VIDEOFILE to represent the output file the videotila generated by the encoder in the command line This is independent of how you decides to select it select it for each export or have a default file mencoder jpegtmpeg Converts jpeg images to mpag vi Do you want to be asked for an output file everytime you choose to exportt Ll Yes a No Set default output file You can select one of these provided you have the programs they use or you can add one of your own To edit one of the present preferences press the Edit button or use the Add button to add a new setting When you have set up a video export setting you can close the Configure menu by pressing the OK button To export your animation to a video file just press File Export Video Ctrl Alt V and you should have a video file of your exellent animat
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