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Thanks to the explosion of inexpensive and excellent video products and software for computers in
the past several years, stop-motion animation is easier than ever to pursue. Making good animations starts with the
equipment. I remember the pain and agony of animating with an 8mm video camera. There was no direct way to shoot a video
frame-by-frame with that particular camcorder. At first I animated figures by shooting bursts of frames. The result was a slow and
unconvincing movement. I then found that I could shoot a burst of frames and then manually back
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the tape up to cut frames
using my camcorder's edit-search feature. This was extremely tedious to say the least, but I was at least able to finally
get a decent speed of figure movement. In hind-site I really wish I would have gotten into using Super-8 film instead of
8mm video for many reasons. Sadly, consumer-level video products have never been good for animation.
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My first taste of non-CG animation on the computer came thanks to a sweet little device known as
Quickcam, originally made by Connectix. What made it so great was that I could now shoot frame-by-frame at a constant
frame-rate. On my camcorder getting a constant frame-rate was close to impossible as in using
the edit-search I would sometimes tap it a little too long and skip several frames or tap it not long enough and skip only one
frame. As neat at the first Quickcam was for animation, the drawbacks to its use were still quite significant. First of all it
was grayscale. Second, only 64 shades
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of grayscale at the most could be used. Third, the picture quality of my camcorder
was much better than the first Quickcam due to higher resolution. Forth, a lengthy uncompressed video wasn't possible due to limitations in my hard drive's capacity and limitations of file sizes on PC's back then.
Fifth, inexpensive and powerful video editing software simply didn't exist. I made a few animations with my first Quickcam
but I mainly still stuck with my video camera. Because of the tedious shooting with my video camera I lost interest in stop-motion
animation for a while.
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Then, around 1999 I got back into stop-motion animation thanks a better Quickcam, the Logitech
Color Quickcam. The Color Quickcam of that time was a vast improvement over the very first one. Not only could it do
color, but it could do 24 bit color. That equates to about 16.7 million different colors. The capture
software of the version I got was also very nice as lighting, color, and shutter speed could be easily adjusted. In
addition, Logitech was smart in not removing Connectix's support of taking videos frame-by-frame. Finally I could focus on
improving my skills of animation instead of my skills of tapping a button on the
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camcorder to skip exactly 2 frames between shots. The Color Quickcam still has some drawbacks though. Being a field-based
capture device it produces interlaced frames that have to be de-interlaced. As a result, the picture quality, while much better
than the original Quickcam and slightly better than my camcorder, is still inferior to even the lowest gauge of film, Super-8.
I am hoping to get into actual film methods of animation. However, video does have many advantages such as low cost, ease of manipulation,
and ease of distribution.
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Another great item of hardware that I recently got was an MJPEG video capture card. This card
allowed me to take all of my older animations on analog 8mm video to a digital video. Once my old material was in a
digital format I then used editing software (mainly Virtual Dub) to restore all of my older animations. Curiously, I found
that my really old animations restored rather nicely. The older animations that I had done in which the figures only moved
every several frames, while being interlaced video in nature,
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didn't appear to be so when taken to a progressive digital format. The reason was that in taping the figures both of the capture fields of the camcorder captured the same still figure. Because there was no actual motion the frames appeared progressive. That meant that I didn't have to worry about
de-interlacing and degrading the video quality on my older animations. All I had to do was eliminate the frames that were
between bursts that appeared interlaced. Such a method has proven to be very nice in creating high quality stop-motion animation on video using field-based capture equipment and a decent video capture card. More recently I used a professional grade digital camcorder to get very nice stop-motion image quality results in my latest video, Brutal Force. The animation sequences are slightly grainy, but much more crisp then anything else I've ever seen in stop-motion animation video.
My Equipment:
Software Used:
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