The camera overlay is the magic sauce of iStopMotion. While animating, you can actually see what changes you make to the scene by seeing both the last picture you’ve taken and the current view from the camera overlayed. This lets you animate very quickly and with high accuracy. You can easily adjust the opacity using an innovative control that appears when you tap and hold on the iPad.
At any time during animating your story, tap the play button to see what you’ve done so far instantly without “waiting for rendering to finish”. This is immensely gratifying and the key to having fun with stop motion animation. This is especially important to kids to keep them interested and motivated, a prerequisite for a better learning experience.
Up to 200 frames can now be exported into an animated GIF. This new feature is a great way for animators of all levels to share snippets of their work in a quick and easy manner. It can be used in email and plays back automatically in many email apps. It can play on almost any browser without a plugin, so it can easily be used on many platforms that allow for the upload of images.
Remember the animated flip books from your childhood? They’re back with a high-tech twist! iStopMotion allows you to print your animations in a format that easily folds into a flip book. Your kids can print out their creations and then show them off to classmates or proud grandparents. Flip books are a great way to share creativity. Ideal for school assignments.
Record audio for use in your iStopMotion project directly in iStopMotion or import a soundtrack from the iPad’s music library, your Dropbox, SoundCloud, via iTunes File Sharing or from any other iPad audio app. iStopMotion lets you add a soundtrack to an existing animation, or helps you animating to a prerecorded soundtrack by showing the audio waveform and playing a preview to help you figure out a music title’s rhythm or the dialog.
Your iPhone can be used as an additional camera while working on your iPad. When you are shooting those really hard-to-get-to angles, the iStopMotion™ Remote Camera app can be a handy tool to have in the back. Position your camera freely and get the highest image quality from your iPhone. The app is available as a free download from the app store.
Hardware requirements:
– iPhone 4 (or newer), iPod touch 4th gen (or newer) or a second iPad 2 (or newer)
When making a stop motion movie, you usually want to make sure that the light doesn’t change from one frame to the other and keep the exposure setting of the camera constant to avoid what is known as flickering. But when shooting time lapse movies of sunsets where the light changes considerably over time, you’ll want to set the exposure to continuously adapt, creating a more natural looking movie.
Some lights cause objects to look more orange, others more blue than they are. Normally, the camera tries to adapt to this automatically. This automation is sometimes distorted by the color of the objects in the scene themselves and might change when you add or replace objects. Manually setting and locking the white balance helps to get more natural, vibrant colors.
iStopMotion uses iOS sharing to send your video to almost anywhere you want: YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Sina Weibo, Dropbox and a lot more. Teachers can easily collect their students work in order simply to share it with the class or to collaborate on a bigger project. Students can easily send it to their family or friends to proudly show off their creations.