The macosxhints Rating:

[0 to 10 lights; 10 = perfect!]

• Developer: GeBE Computer & Peripherie GmbH [Product Page]
  
• Price: Free preview edition

A pick of the week that only scores a '4' on the scale? Yes, because this is such a cool little app with great potential. What does it do? iStopMotion makes the tedious task of creating stop-motion animated films much easier. If you've got a QuickTime compatible video camera and some free time, iStopMotion can help turn you into the next Will Vinton.

For those unfamiliar with the concept, stop-action films are created by placing an object, taking a picture of it, moving the object, taking another picture, and then repeating that process about 2.8 million times. It's very hard to do because you generally can't see the result of your animation until after you've shot the whole thing, and there's no easy way to go back and edit just one piece of it.

iStopMotion improves this by giving you a live preview window, showing a semi-transparent overlay of the current shot on top of the last shot. In addition, "onion skinning" lets you see the last few shots in sequence before you take the next. In short, it makes the process much less tedious and reduces the number of re-shoots that you'll have to do to get the effect you wanted.

iStopMotion scores only a '4' here because it's quite buggy (but it is only a preview release, and the problems are acknowledged on their site). The program crashed repeatedly on me, but you can work around that a bit. Just make sure you hit Command-S regularly to save your in-progress movie, and if/when iStopMotion does crash, you can just start a new film, and then combine the resulting files in QuickTime. But if you don't save, the crashed file will not open properly in QuickTime! Despite the bugs, it's still fun to play with, and it really will get you thinking about all the fun things you could do with your camera and a little bit of time. You'll also want to have a tripod to get the most professional results, as you don't want the camera to move at all between shots.

While clearly not ready for prime time, iStopMotion is a unique, useful, and creative piece of software with potential if they can address the crashing bugs. It doesn't make stop-motion animation easy, but it certainly makes it much easier!