Stop motion animation

Completely and utterly unrelated.

Moderators: raboof, MattKingUSA, khz

Post Reply
User avatar
Michael Willis
Established Member
Posts: 1451
Joined: Mon Oct 03, 2016 3:27 pm
Location: Rocky Mountains, North America
Has thanked: 68 times
Been thanked: 163 times
Contact:

Stop motion animation

Post by Michael Willis »

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.
rghvdberg
Established Member
Posts: 1067
Joined: Mon May 12, 2014 7:11 am
Has thanked: 15 times
Been thanked: 36 times

Re: Stop motion animation

Post by rghvdberg »

There's a utility called webcam. Cli tool to take periodic pictures with a .. webcam.
Maybe that can be used for scripting?
elerale
Established Member
Posts: 36
Joined: Sat Nov 19, 2016 4:45 am
Has thanked: 2 times
Been thanked: 2 times

Re: Stop motion animation

Post by elerale »

Hello,

Toonloop maybe ?

http://toonloop.com/

Cheers
Erwan
durfnap
Established Member
Posts: 25
Joined: Tue Jul 10, 2012 3:16 pm

Re: Stop motion animation

Post by durfnap »

There's a software called Stopmotion for that approach. Kdenlive is also able to capture pictures from a webcam with onion skinning.
rghvdberg
Established Member
Posts: 1067
Joined: Mon May 12, 2014 7:11 am
Has thanked: 15 times
Been thanked: 36 times

Re: Stop motion animation

Post by rghvdberg »

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
User avatar
loxstep
Established Member
Posts: 37
Joined: Thu Jan 11, 2018 12:40 am

Re: Stop motion animation

Post by loxstep »

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.
User avatar
Michael Willis
Established Member
Posts: 1451
Joined: Mon Oct 03, 2016 3:27 pm
Location: Rocky Mountains, North America
Has thanked: 68 times
Been thanked: 163 times
Contact:

Re: Stop motion animation

Post by Michael Willis »

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.
User avatar
Michael Willis
Established Member
Posts: 1451
Joined: Mon Oct 03, 2016 3:27 pm
Location: Rocky Mountains, North America
Has thanked: 68 times
Been thanked: 163 times
Contact:

Re: Stop motion animation

Post by Michael Willis »

42low wrote:Is it for a video clip? If so i can't wait for it.... :mrgreen:
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 :lol: ), but I encouraged my son to get more experience making videos before we incorporate sound.
Post Reply