Sound for Film and Video

Recently I was at the San Francisco Mac convention. All the big boys with their new toys were there. From the Mac Mini, to the sports car that can control your ipod right from the steering wheel.

What I like so much about the Mac Convention, are the little booths in the back. They are basically little podiums packed like a forest where people with enough Chutzpah believe their software or hardware idea has what it takes to be a success.

While hunting through this electronic forest I came across two young men who had a number of little programs, one of them in particular caught my eye. It’s called iStopMotion and its concept and ease of use make it a winner in my book.

For those of you interested in Stop Animation, here is an indispensable program. Using the Quicktime engine, iStop allows you to capture individual images one frame at a time and then play them back as a movie. Now I know what you’re thinking, “I can do that in Final Cut or a hundred other video programs”. Well yes you can if you want to take a hundred additional steps to get there. This software loads up in a flash and is ready to play back just as quickly.

Simply hook up a camera, open iStop, pick your frame rate and image size then get animating! What’s so nice about this program is how easy it is to use. I’m a big supporter of SSI, (Smart Simple Interfacing) and this program does just that. Another feature which was great is the onion skin. This lets you see a ghost image of what you took as a photo the frame before. You can even ghost several frames to see how your motion is traveling. Once finished with your movie, iStop allows you to output in many different formats. This will surely be the Swiss Army Knife of stop motion and with a retail price at around $40 it can’t be beat! My hats off to the guys and gals at Boinx software, great concept great execution. Now if they only made an audio mastering program!