Objects At Rest

explorations in audio and moving imagery

Category: Animation

  • Video: Frame Rate and a Fix for the Ghosting Effect

    In both Man Drawing a Reclining Woman and the Sword of Damocles I have what looks like ghosting in the animation. My process is to shoot 12 photos for each second of animation then stretch that sequence in Sony Vegas to 24fps. Vegas then blurs every other frame. When analyzing the footage within Vegas frame by frame I would see one clean frame followed by blended frame composed of the the previous frame and the next frame.

    What I found out a few months ago is a setting in Sony Vegas called “disable resample” which eliminates the blending and will render each frame cleanly. The result is that every frame is shown twice with no blending. The default in Vegas is set to resample which blends every other frame automatically for image sequence clips. I still haven’t found a way to disable it permanently but in the meantime I am re-mastering my films to remove the ghosting. Jason, on a thread for a related topic at the stopmotionanimation.com forum, mentions the same fix in Adobe Premier by unchecking “blend speed changes”.

    Here is my breakdown of the process:

    • Shoot 12 photos for each second of animation with my DSLR camera (the spy cam is the same)
    • Import the frames into Vegas as a numbered image sequence
    • For each sequence/clip I set the frame rate to 24fps and a field order of None (progressive)
    • Drag the sequence to the timeline
    • For each clip or sequence on the editing timeline I:
      Right Click > Choose Switches > Choose Disable Resample

  • Set and Stage: Some Assembly Required

    Tonight I continued to put my set pieces back together and started shooting test photos to check alignment and spacing between the background, the stage, and the camera.

    photo

  • New Studio Setup

    I’m hoping to get back into production on the Vitruvius film in April. I’ve started to re-build my sets in my new studio. The following picture captures my carts and stages better than previous photos.

    photo

  • Community: Stopmotion Animators Meet Up

    Looks like some casual meetings took place on April 1, 2007 on both sides of the country.

    Here on the east coast, I was invited over to Takuro Masuda’s studio where he is filming his stop motion project for the Center for Puppetry Arts Experimental Puppetry Theater. His project involves Native American mythology and looks to be superb. Takuro is an Atlanta animator and one of his films titled “Room 101” is viewable on YouTube.

    Brett Thompson, was also there. Brett was interviewed and had his Flash animations shown on a cable show last night. I missed that but hope to see a copy sometime. We all talked about stopmo walk cycles, video assist, set design and other stuff.

    Out on the west coast Michael Granberry met up with Justin Rasch and Shel Wagner-Rasch from Stop Motion Mission where they chatted about stopmo and ate Indian food. You can’t go wrong with that combo.

  • Objects at Rest … Dot Com

    My new web address www.objectsatrest.com is now official. I was able to acquire the “dot com” version of the domain name.

    The former address www.objectsatrest.org should still work and redirect to the .com site but you may want to update any links or bookmarks that you may have.

    The former owner of the domain now has a new web address located at Pyile.com.