Stop Motion Animation - Photoshop CS3 Extended

I'm trying to create a stop motion animation, and at the moment I'm using a digital still camera, tripod and Photoshop CS3 Extended.

I want to open all the shots as layers in one image document to be compiled as a frame animation but I can;t seem to do it nor find a tutorial covering it. Is Photoshop the right tool for this? Is there a better package? I'd prefer open source software (cost obviously) and I run Vista on a core 2 duo laptop if anyone's got any suggestions.

I'm still looking on 'tinterweb but I'm having trouble finding what I'm after. Any ideas would be most appreciated.

I did stumble on this though:
www.brickfilms.com...
Lego movies!

Cheers.

[edit on 20/10/2008 by Sendran]

If you have Paint Shop Pro, it probably installed with another app called Animation Shop. That is what I use to compile all my bitmaps to animated gifs. I believe it will do AVI as well. Here are samples of the output.

I assume you want to do an animated gif in Photoshop.

Just layer all the images in a photoshop document and go to:

Window > Animation

This will place an animation control at the bottom of the photoshop workspace....from there you can define the animation. When you are finished and want to save the file as an animation click:

File > Save for Web&Devices

...and use the gif setting.

Thank you for your posts. Did you make those gif's?

I'm playing around with the animation palette as we speak. How big can gif files be? My project is around 7 minutes long.

I've only used PS3 for gif animations up to say 30 frames so I have no idea how a 7 min short film would render. I'm guessing there are better better solutions for a project that big.....maybe Adobe Premiere with a final avi render?

I wish I could be of more help. Maybe there are true graphic/image professionals reading this that could guide you.

[edit on 10/21/2008 by kinglizard]

Yes, I made the gifs in my above post.

If you watch shows on television, you will notice that most scenes are only several minutes long. Rarely does one scene span seven minutes. They are usually broken up by cutaways, fades, and other devices. I think that if you want to do the whole seven minute scene in one go that the only problem might be the memory and Photoshop should have some way for you to increase the memory allocated to it if you need to, but I do not use it, so I do not know how to do it.

A cheap application for stitching scenes together is Magix Music Maker. It was intended for music production and has a very, very, very, deep toolset. However you can also work with video and stills to produce sophisticated audio video productions.

[edit on 10-21-2008 by groingrinder]

you can make animated gifs with photoshop, but stop motion animation as in using a camera and multiple frames to create animation photoshop might not be the best answer.


it will work.


but try strata studio if they still make it or something of that nature

If you are still looking for a way to open multiple images as layers, open photoshop, then under the file>import menu, import images to stack. and btw, if you are trying to save something that big, you will have to save as large document format, as PSD files have to be less then 2 gigs.

I don't know if I understand what you want, but if you want to make a movie with the images you can use VirtualDub.

It's free and it has a lot of filters available, and one of its features is the possibility of creating a movie with images.

Just to see what I could do, after I made my previous post I made this small movie.

The 19 1024x768 photos were taken with a Canon MV730i, loaded in VirtualDub, I applied a level change (the images were too dark), I resized the video to 320x240 and created an AVI video.

As VirtualDub can only create AVI videos, I used WinFF to create the FLV file that I uploaded (I always convert first to FLV on my computer to avoid the automatic converters from the sites).



PS: as you can see, my artistic level is very low, so I guess I will not win any Oscar with this video.

This was just a quick test, it took me 12 minutes, from the time I took the first photo up to the creation of the FLV video.