"Stop motion effect"

T

tampawolf

Well-known member
Posted this in the wrong forum... no wonder I didn't get any responses.

What I want to know is, is there a way to do this effect using the GH2 as a video, not a series of stills? At least I assume this was a series of stills, but what I would like is just to see if there is a plugin that will pull frames or something of the nature? Basically what is the easiest way to get this effect? I'm not opposed to just shooting stills btw, just seems like there has got to be a better/easier way to do it. Thanks.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbHbwkp7M8c
 
Well, one way that you could mimic that look is to, first of all, shoot at the highest shutter speed that your camera supports. If necessary, add light to compensate for the lack of sensitivity. The most noticeable attribute to stop-motion footage is the complete lack of motion blur, so a high shutter speed speed will help there. It might also help to have your actors slow down their movements a bit. Again, the objective here is to eliminate motion blur.

As far as software that will drop frames for you, Blender 3d's sequence editor allows you to set a "strobe" attribute that, when set to values higher than 1.00 will drop frames from the clip and give that stuttery look. I'm sure that other NLEs have a similar feature, but Blender is just the one that I am most familiar with.

EDIT: I almost forgot, you could also try Avidemux. The relevant setting is under Filters->Transform->Resample fps.

Shooting it as a series of stills, instead of video might have at least one advantage. You can use raw, which will give you more possibilities for creatively grading the footage, as well as higher image quality all around.

That's how I would approach it, anyway.
 
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Your issue with stills will be timing - most DSLRs will do 3-10 FPS, with higher rates shooting JPEG instead of RAW. Some cameras slow down as the shot count goes up. If you can get a steady x-number of FPS, you'll have to rehearse how long a movement takes in "reality", and then slow down the action by x-percent and rehearse it that way.

Automatically dropping frames via software and avoiding motion blur would likely be less hassle and a more consistent result.

You can convert video to an image sequence, and then manually remove frames - that would kinda suck with several minutes of footage though... look into Wesley's links above and see if that solved your problem.
 
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