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How can I align photos for stop motion?
Command Line Tool for Converting Image Sequence to Quicktime .mov Video

Want to do a project with my kids over the holidays and create a stop motion video using their large assortment of dolls. We are good with taking the shots but wondering what a good editing app would be to put it all together.

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  • See my answer to a similar question for an app to help with photo alignment. As for converting the images into a movie, this question may help.
    – Friend Of George
    Commented Dec 19, 2012 at 16:36
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    could you provide your operating system? so that we can provide a wider range of solutions.
    – Inan
    Commented Dec 19, 2012 at 18:12
  • Thanks for the answer FoG. I have a Macbook Pro so looking for an OSX solution.
    – Sonny Bhatia
    Commented Dec 19, 2012 at 19:38

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Personally, for a quick-and-dirty solution, I use iMovie. You put all the stills into a new project, then you highlight them all, choose clip settings and disable the Ken Burns effect, and put the duration of the photo to 0.1 seconds (This is the fastest iMovie can handle).

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If you just want to put all the photos together at a certain frame-rate I would recommend Quicktime 7. Keep in mind that no editing with respect to colour and contrast is possible in that application, it's very basic.

These are the steps when you want to make a stop-motion video out of a series of photographs:

  1. Install Quicktime 7 from the original installation CD. I am certain that this is possible on Snow Leopard, not sure about newer OS's. Also check your Utilities folder, maybe it's already installed.

  2. Organize. Make sure that your images are in one folder and that they are sequentially named. The first frame should have the lowest number (not necessarily 1) and the last frame should have the highest number.

  3. Resize.Check the size of your photos. If they're shot on a consumer level compact camera it is very likely that the size is something like 3888 x 2592 pixels. For a photo this is good, but for a video/time-lapse this is overkill. I would recommend to resize the photos such that the longest size is smaller or equal to 1920 pixels.

    3a. Resize using Preview. You can resize the images in any way you want, I will explain the workflow when you use the pre-installed Preview. Work on a copy of the images, just in case something goes wrong.

    • Open Preview, click File -> Open or hit cmd+O.
    • Navigate to the folder containing a copy of the images and select them all to open.
    • Make sure the sidebar is visible. Go to View -> Sidebar -> Show Sidebar or hit shift+cmd+D.
    • Go to View -> Sidebar -> Contact Sheet or hit cmd+option+1.
    • Now select all the images and go to Tools -> Adjust Size...
    • You will see the following window: enter image description here
    • Change the largest dimension (in this image the width) to 1920 and leave the rest as is.
    • Wait for Preview to process all images.
    • Go to File - Save All or hit cmd+option+S.

  4. Load the images. Open Quicktime 7, go to File -> Open Image Sequence... or just hist shift+cmd+o and select the first image of the resized sequence. Click Open.

  5. Pick your desired frame-rate. This depends on the amount of photos you have taken and influences how long your final time-lapse will be.

  6. Finished. Now the time-lapse movie is done. Click File -> Save and save it as a self-contained movie. Or you can hit File -> Export if you want more control over the movie format.

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