Check your animation - Windows

A movie is just a bunch of still images changed fast enough to make us see the illusion of motion. Digital still cameras very conveniently shoot still images numbered consecutively in the order they were taken. Put a bunch of them in a folder and they very conveniently line up in sequence, just like the frames on a piece of movie film. In Windows, I can plug my Canon camera in and have it show up as a disk drive, with each image showing up as a separate file.

I've copied the files onto my PC, putting them all into one folder. Windows Explorer can show the contents of a folder in many ways; here's a list of the file names:

Interesting enough, but the most useful view for an animator is the thumbnail view. (You probably know how to do this already; just choose Thumbnails in the View menu.) Here's what it looks like, with the window sized to show two of the thumbnails at a time:

What you may not realize is that you can preview your animation in this window! Just click on one of the thumbnails (I've already done it in the view above; the file name is highlighted in blue) and then hold down the down arrow or up arrow key. You'll see the animation, something like you see in the GIF image below. The animation won't loop like the GIF image does, but you can alternate pressing the down and up arrows to make it go forward and backward.

Not bad! The frame rate is whatever speed the keyboard repeats at, which might not be the rate you intend, but at least you can see the movement. The thumbnail image is a bit small so I can't see all the details of the motion. Still, it's a start, and I like the animation well enough to continue working with the shot. If there was something seriously wrong, it'd be back for Take 2!

Windows can do even better for us. Right-click one of the images and choose Preview. The Windows Picture and Fax Viewer will open and show you the frame, like this:

Now press and hold the right arrow key. Once again you'll see the animation - but bigger. Windows still adds some flickering text once in a while, telling you it's creating a preview, but then Windows does always like telling you things you don't really need to know.

This time, the animation will loop as long as you hold down the right arrow key. (The animated GIF here is actually playing back a bit more smoothly than the Windows picture and fax viewer does it.)

You can also see how I shifted the camera when I pushed the shutter button clumsily, by hand, and I bumped into the stool at the lower left of the frame. We won't do anything about these things this time - but I do want to be more controlled next time

Viewing my animation this way is workable, but crude. In particular I don't have any real control over the frame rate. With the thumbnail view the image is very small and with the Windows picture and fax viewer, megapixel images don't load well enough to let me really see the animation. So, I wrote a program to help: StopMotion FlipView. StopMotion FlipView shows a folder of JPG, TIF, PSD or PNG images as a flipbook, at frame rates from 0 to 30 frames per second, forward and reverse. The images are sized to fit a VGA frame (640x480) and even multimegapixel images flip at full speed. I use it with images from digital still cameras, scanners, and graphics software (I have additional helper programs for the last). It's one of the programs I want you to try (of course)! It's available for PC and Mac. Click on the image above to see the StopMotion FlipView tutorial page. Since you're in the Windows Quick Animation series of pages, here's the download link for the PC trial version ofStopMotion FlipView: Download and try StopMotion FlipView for Windows The free trial runs for a maximum of 20 uses over a maximum of 30 days. StopMotion FlipView runs on Windows XP and Vista, and requires Apple's Quicktime. Quicktime is a free download from Apple at http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/. To find out more about StopMotion FlipView, visit the program's Help page. Get animating! Purchase StopMotion FlipView securely via PayPal. Just click on the button below: Within 24 hours you'll receive an email with your license key and instructions for unlocking StopMotion FlipView.

That's got us halfway to the goal - we've got an animation, and we know how it moves. If you've used StopMotion FlipView to view it, you know how fast you want it to run, as well. In the next chapter of this adventure we'll use a free program to turn our frames into a movie file. Then we can do whatever we want with it, including uploading it to the Web.