A minor update to StopMotion Station

I've made a minor change to StopMotion Station based on a workshop that I'll be doing at Quickdraw Animation Society (QAS) on November 10, 2007. One of the things I'll be doing in the workshop is animating in sync with a soundtrack. I animated to a soundtrack during QAS's Animation Lockdown earlier this year, and the sync was perfect; but I've realized I could make working with a soundtrack better and easier.

To animate to a soundtrack you use StopMotion Station's Dial counters. Just press the D key when you're Shooting or Viewing a movie, and the Dial overlay will pop up. Press D again to hide the Dial. The Dial includes two counters: a footage counter that shows you how many frames are in your current folder, and a frame counter that keeps track of how many frames you've shot since the last time you reset it (by pressing Alt-D).

I had set up the footage counter to be a literal footage counter - counting in frames, feet of 35 mm film (16 frames per foot) or 16mm feet (40 frames per foot). This was a throwback to animation stands, where that's how you kept track of your shooting. Working on a little promo video for the November workshop, I realized it would be a lot more useful to show the footage as seconds and frames.

So now (Ta-DAA) the footage counter shows frames or seconds and frames. And you can choose 30 frames per second, for working in NTSC video; 25 frames per second, for PAL video; or 24 frames per second for working film style. The Other options tab of the Setup dialog lets you choose the one you want.

This change lets us break down a soundtrack at the frame rate of the movie we're making and use those time and frame counts directly when we're animating. This also shows an important facet of my programming: I actually use my software in real-life creation and make the changes that I find genuinely helpful.

I'll be resubmitting StopMotion Station for the malware-free certifications. I also plan to shoot video at my QAS workshop, so you'll see me in action animating to a (short) soundtrack. The other technique I'll demonstrate is copying motion from one movie to another, a little like rotoscoping. If you check out my movie "Beginning" at Stopmotion-Software.com you'll see some of this at 1:14, where I copied a dancer's motion in aquarium gravel.

The updated StopMotion Station 1.3 installer is now online at Stopmotion-Software.com. If you've purchased StopMotion Station, the license file I emailed you works with the updated version as well. Just download the new installer, uninstall StopMotion Station, reinstall it from the new download, and unlock it as per the instructions in the email.

Happy animating!