LinuxMusicians

My son is showing interest in making his own stop-motion animation. Can anybody suggest a good workflow on Linux for using a webcam to take a series of pictures and animate them? I was thinking of just using a simple webcam app like Cheese or something, and then writing a simple python script to collect all images in a single folder and putting them in chronological order as frames in some kind of video file format. I can also imagine that it's likely that there are some better tools for doing this.

Edit: looks like avconf is the command line tool of choice for converting a series of images into a video file.

There's a utility called webcam. Cli tool to take periodic pictures with a .. webcam.
Maybe that can be used for scripting?

Hello,

Toonloop maybe ?

http://toonloop.com/

Cheers
Erwan

There's a software called Stopmotion for that approach. Kdenlive is also able to capture pictures from a webcam with onion skinning.

I just remembered my then 9 yr old son took 413 pictures to make a stop motion animation.

He made a camera stand from Lego bricks

I think I used ffmpeg to make the video.

https://youtu.be/KJOYQUiz2VM

I've been making short animations recently and I've found the "Import Image Sequence" feature of Openshot very handy. https://www.openshot.org/

You'd need 1 image file per frame of animation, and they'd have to be numbered in order (frame1.jpg, frame2.jpg ... and so on). Then you import the sequence in Openshot, set the frame rate, and how many times you want it to play (if it's meant to be looping).

I have found Openshot to be the least buggy video editor that's easily found in most repos.

We finally got around to trying this tonight. Toonloop looked promising, but I couldn't get it to install. I did get Stopmotion to install, and it's just what I was looking for, something minimal with a simple button press to capture each frame and an easy export option. If we end up wanting more advanced video editing features, we'll likely investigate kdenlive and openshot.

42low wrote:Is it for a video clip? If so i can't wait for it....

Ha, we just did a small test, a three second loop of a lego man falling down and getting back up. Eventually I would like to make a music video (of course ), but I encouraged my son to get more experience making videos before we incorporate sound.