qStopMotion

Despite the advancements in technology and film making, stop motion animation never ceased to exist. In fact, there are Oscar-nominated stop-frame films in a world that has been dominated by computer-generated imagery in the recent years. Moreover, there are quite a few applications dedicated to creating stop-motion animations and we are here to talk about qStopMotion today.

This particular application is an open-source alternative to more sophisticated editors, providing a software tool with a decent set of features. With its help, users can generate stop-motion animations at home without having to deal with complicated settings.

Upon launch, a new project must be created in qStopMotion, which is made up of multiple scenes. An animation scene can include multiple takes and, in turn, a take comprises one or more frames. The pictures you take are saved as individual frames.

qStopMotion can capture webcam input and save the resulting images as individual frames. It supports various resolutions and allows two recording modes; namely single frame captures or time-lapse captures. The camera controller offers plenty image quality and camera controls for you to capture clear images.

Alternatively, you can also insert images from your computer into the animation. Various file formats are supported, including the most popular ones, such as PNG, JPG, BMP, GIF and TIF. The movie layout is shown in the timeline area, in the lower side of the main window and the full animation can be previewed before saving.

There is a plethora of settings available for you to go through but we will only bring up those related to exporting the resulting video. qStopMotion can create MP4 or AVI animation clips, encoded by ffmpeg or libav. There are various quality settings available, including HD-ready and full HD video.   The frame rate can be customized and the structure of the movie can be easily altered. All the scenes and takes can be either united in a single movie or you can opt to split the movie by scenes or takes.

After playing around with qStopMotion, we can say that it is a decent alternative to more complex software in its category, despite the fact that it integrating more exporting options would add to its value. While professionals and movie makers might prefer more complex software, home users can find in qStopMotion everything they need to create compelling stop motion animations. It is open-source, which is yet another plus.