Animator Software
Easily create stop-motion animations on Mac or Windows. Features include live onion-skinning (superimposing the last frame over a live video feed of the frame you're about to shoot), color controls, manual camera control (on Mac), some basic editing tools and Quicktime movie export.
Animator exports animations to a Quicktime movie that you can open and edit in iMovie, Final Cut, Premiere, Vegas, or any Quicktime compatible video editor.
The mac version allows some manual exposure and white-balance control of uvc–compliant webcams. This is very important in stop-motion animation to maintain consistent color from one frame of your movie to the next. Camera controls are specifically built to work with logitech webcams - the C310 in particular, but it should probably mostly work with other uvc webcams. The windows version does not include this control because most webcams that allow manual control come with Windows software that does the job. You can run this software alongside Animator.
Projects are stored in a folder as a series or numbered .jpg images. This way, even if Animator crashes, none of your work is lost. You can also use animator to choose a folder of images created in any manner (such as images shot on a digital camera) and assemble them into a movie.
On Windows, make sure you install Quicktime and Java or Animator will not work correctly. Quicktime is necessary for Animator's core functionality. Animator will run without java, but the frame deletion feature and the manual camera control will not work.
This software was originally built for a series of classes I taught at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. There was no free or very cheap mac stop motion animation software with live onion skinning that was stable enough to use for a class, so I built Animator. Now, after using it for several years in classes at PAAM, the software has arrived at a level of maturity where I'm making it available to everyone. Enjoy!
Please report any bugs you find - I've done lots of testing on Mac, but not much on Windows yet.
Animator 0.7 for Mac – 23.7 MB
Animator 0.7 for Windows – 10.4 MB
No warranty, no gurantees, etc. Drop me a line by email if you think this software is cool or useful.