Finally There

Over two years of development, we have tried to make iStopMotion more powerful for the professional users yet retain the ease of use that enables even young kids to have fun using the product at school. Not an easy task as we had to look at the needs of the various users and get them all covered.

New Workflow

The number one problem with iStopMotion 1 was that if it quit unexpectedly, all the work was lost. As it was capturing frames, those were written to an invisible, temporary file from where they could be recovered and from where they had to be copied to the final destination when you saved your work. This took a lot of time and caused a lot of anxiety at the end of your work.

In iStopMotion 2, the workflow is turned around. First, you need to give your file a name and a location, so that iStopMotion can save the images directly to that file. That way, there is no waiting at the end of the work when you save your movie and if iStopMotion should crash, the file is in most cases recoverable.

If you are a professional you will save time by saving your standard project settings as a custom preset. For teachers, projects with students become easier because the student can only choose from presets defined by the teacher.

Home, Express, Pro

iStopMotion now comes in three flavors, targeting different users. The Home edition is for the family, where the parents want to spend a great weekend with their kids, like New York Times columnist David Pogue. The Express version is for the serious hobbyist animator, with all the great stuff appreciated by pro animators at a reasonable price. The Pro edition is for the animator who makes money (or plans to) with stop motion animation.

For a comparison of the new flavors and pricing see the Flavors page.

Virtual Stage

iStopMotion 2 lets you animate items into an existing background movie or make a background to an existing foreground movie. For example, you might have an underwater movie of a coral reef. Animating swimming fish in front of it is easy. All you need is a backdrop of uniform color as a background for the fish models. Then you use the chroma keying feature to replace the uniform background color with the background movie.

If you have a movie of a person in front of a green screen (with the alpha channel already processed) you can also do the reverse: create an animated background for the person to walk in.

The Home edition includes a number of stock movies and images that you can use as background or foreground for example an image frame or a stage curtain. In the Express and Pro editions, you can use your own images or movies.

Taking a Cue

Getting the movement of people or objects right is difficult in animation. So a popular technique is to load in a reference movie, for example with a real actor, and use it as cue for your animation.

Realtime Recording

Every animator knows that there are instances where you wish you could just quickly record something in real time, be it an item falling over, a particular camera movement or zoom. With iStopMotion 2, you can capture video in realtime, specifying either the number of frames or the period in seconds.

HD

If you want to record HD, there now is a solution. While HDV over FireWire still cannot be supported, you can use a Sony HD camera with HDMI output, an Blackmagic Intensity card and a MacPro to build a solution that can capture 1080p stop motion movies or time lapse recordings.

Support for non-square pixels is important if you want to record DV in 16:9.

Other

All the new features are packaged in a new design with an improved toolbar, making iStopMotion even easier to use. You can further improve your productivity with many more, user definable keyboard and speech shortcuts.