A few years ago I completed a massive stop motion project:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nd0nQE_nw20
which has over 6000 shots, and used a combination of webcam shots, digital camera shots and a live action camera.
I will like to venture the opinion that the software for stop motion animation is generally terrible.
I tried out a bunch of software and almost all of them were either :
- Too expensive
- Crashed too often
- Difficult to use
- Had practically no features
- Were impossible to evaluate
For something that's such a simple thing, take a bunch of shots and join them together, the software that's out there is _terrible_. The only one that was even vaguely plausable to use was Stop Motion Pro - and even then it was expensive. The only caveat that I'd like to add is that it was about 4 years ago.
I ended up using software called MonkeyJam, which even still crashed frequently, and used Adobe's Premiere Pro to join it all together. It was a nightmare.
This article is a basic puff piece on how nice and easy everything is, in particular:
"Young kids can make a film in their room and distribute it and have half a million people view it"
what a load of rubbish. Show me a bunch of stop motion films that a bunch of kids have made in their rooms with over half a million views. Unless it's spectacular nobody is going to view it.