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Subject: 
How do you position shots with a DSC?
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.animation
Date: 
Sun, 24 Jun 2007 21:43:06 GMT
Viewed: 
8251 times
  
I've been looking more deeply into using a digital still camera (DSC) to do
animation.  This has regrettably resulting in me being more confused than
before.

Let me start by explaining how I've done it in the past: using a video source (a
web cam), with FrameThief software, I get a live video feed of the current scene
superimposed over the previous frame.  This lets me position things with
precisely the motion I want, fix things after I bump them, etc.  Then I take a
shot, and the software simply gathers several frames of the video feed and saves
them as a frame of the movie.

Now, reading the FrameThief docs, it sounds like DSCs can't quite work this way.
Instead, you need a video feed from a separate source.  Some DSCs can spit out
an analog video signal, which you run through a frame-grabber device to convert
to a FireWire video feed.  But this is much lower resolution (usually
quarter-VGA) than the images actually captured.  Still, at least the view should
line up with the real shots.  The alternative is to use a separate camera for
positioning things, like the webcam I was using before.  But then the actual
shot is from a different viewpoint, and what I get is not what I see before
taking each frame.

This sounds like a fairly miserable state of affairs either way, so I'm
wondering what other people do.  Should I give up on using a DSC and be looking
for a high-quality digital video camera instead?  Or are there DSCs that put out
a decent-resolution video feed?  Or do you just use one of the methods I
described above and deal with it?

Finally, for the Mac users here: what software are you using?  I tried
iStopMotion once and hate it (plus its lack of documentation), but at least it's
still being updated; FrameThief is getting quite long in the tooth by now.
Recommendations appreciated.

Thanks,
- Joe



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