I took over 1100 pic­tures of Lori mak­ing a pump­kin pie and cre­at­ed a stop action ani­ma­tion using the hum­ble Win­dows Movie Mak­er. It turns out that nei­ther of my Win­dows machines are pow­er­ful enough for Pho­to­shop to con­vert that many RAW files in one action or Win­dows Movie Mak­er to ren­der them into a video larg­er then for an iPod.

I over­came that prob­lem by con­vert­ing half of the RAW files at a time to 720x480 jpgs, com­press­ing them down to 5. In order to cre­ate an AVI file in Movie Mak­er, I had to cre­ate 12 dif­fer­ent videos of 100 pic­tures each and then com­bine them to make one com­plete video. For post­ing on Smug­Mug, I then saved the video in anoth­er small­er for­mat.

Look­ing back, I could have shot the orig­i­nal pic­tures in jpeg at the cor­rect res­o­lu­tion sav­ing a big step. And I need to fig­ure out the best for­mat to save it for the web. Still work­ing these things out.

It’s not too bad. Click the pic­ture below and check it out. And then read my own crit­i­cal review below.

More thoughts: I learned a few things here, after repeat­ed view­ings.

1 - I observe the expo­sure chang­ing near­ly every frame, as Lori moves her arms in and out of the pic­ture. The cause? I used aper­ture pri­or­i­ty mode. As things move around, espe­cial­ly the black sleeves of Lori’s shirt, the “cor­rect” expo­sure changes and the cam­era adjusts the shut­ter speed. While her arms are now cor­rect­ly exposed a change can be seen in sur­round­ing areas such as in the wood­en cab­i­nets.

Once I deter­mined the best expo­sure set­ting, I should have worked in man­u­al mode which will lock those set­tings in. Do not change them! Deter­min­ing that cor­rect expo­sure is the trick. Using man­u­al mode, chances are not every scene will be per­fect­ly exposed, (ie; the black shirt mov­ing in and out of the pic­ture and mov­ing to var­i­ous scenes with­in the kitchen). You need to exper­i­ment and find the set­tings that bal­ance expo­sure for the whole of the ani­ma­tion.

2 - I also see the focal length chang­ing, or at least appears to change. Watch the edges of the video as they dis­ap­pear and reap­pear. My guess is the aut­o­fo­cus is adjust­ing as arms and items move around the frame. The solu­tion again is to set the best focus for the scene and turn off the auto­mat­ic focus. I need to ver­i­fy this with the next ani­ma­tion.

3 - The col­or and bright­ness are dull. I filmed this at night under a mix of incan­des­cent and full spec­trum flu­o­res­cent light­ing. I set the white bal­ance to incan­des­cent and did not use a white or grey card. I thought the col­ors looked pret­ty accu­rate.

Maybe what this need­ed was more light. A faster lens would help too, enabling faster shut­ter speeds. It would also allow a small­er aper­ture and a greater depth of field, bring­ing more into focus.

To sum­ma­rize what I have learned, con­sid­er using man­u­al expo­sure set­tings and turn aut­o­fo­cus off. Bring in more light then you think you need, espe­cial­ly to com­pen­sate for low light lens­es you may not own. If the project is impor­tant, rent the equip­ment you need. Learn to use the soft­ware and know the capa­bil­i­ty of your com­put­er.

For soft­ware, I may look into Adobe Pre­mier Ele­ments. Sim­i­lar to Pho­to­shop Ele­ments, it appears that Pre­mier Ele­ments pro­vides all the basic tools need­ed to cre­ate and edit video for about a 1/5 of the price of the full blown pro­gram.