Check your animation - MacA 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. On the Mac, my goal is to get all the animation frames into a folder. My Mac doesn’t show the camera as a disk drive, like my Windows PC does, so it’s not just a straight copy in the Finder. I’ve found two ways to get at the pictures, using either iPhoto or ImageCapture.
IPhoto is good at managing still photos and snapshots. That’s overkill for animation frames – I don’t really need to have the animation frames in a photo album. And to get at the frames, I’d just have to copy them back out of iPhoto and put them somewhere else on my drive. I’d wind up with two copies of the frames – a distinct waste of my precious disk space. Instead, I fire up ImageCapture. It opens a window for each device it finds – so I typically see a window for my scanner whether I want to use it or not, as well as a dialog for the camera. I use the dialog to locate and set up a folder for the frames, then copy them into the folder. There are (as usual) lots of options for the operation, but at least it’s straightforward.
On Windows computers I found a couple of ways to look at my animation using only what comes with the operating system. Alan Ferguson, at Quickdraw Animation Society, helped me find a couple of ways to check an animation on the Mac using the Finder. You begin by opening the folder of animation frames and selecting all of the frames. You can use the mouse, but I prefer to press Command-A. If you're not on System 10.5 you can only Preview the images. In the Finder's File menu choose Open With>Preview, or right-click/control-click one of the files and choose Open With>Preview. The multi-image Preview window will open. When you hold down the Down Arrow or Up Arrow key the preview will change rapidly enough for you to see the motion in the movie. The animated GIF below loops through the animation rather than stopping at the end frames, but you get the idea.  You can do it another way with System 10.5. Open the folder with the frames, then choose Quick Look under Finder’s File menu to open the Quick Look picture viewer. The keyboard shortcut for this is Command-Y, and it’s what I use – I really love keyboard shortcuts. The multiple file preview window looks like this:
Once the Quick Look window opens, just use the Right Arrow key to step forward through the animation, or the Left Arrow key to step backward. Holding the keys down will play the frames at whatever rate the keyboard repeats, and the playback loops nicely in both directions.  Best of all, you can zoom the animation up to full screen to get a really good look at it. The illustration above is reduced in size to be practical on the Web, but the full screen preview is really excellent. In this shot, my animated motion is pretty good, but you can see how I shifted the camera when I pushed the shutter button clumsily, by hand. I also 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. These methods work with any folder full of images that Finder can preview. Try it with some of the folders full of pictures on your computer. You might be surprised at the motion you discover! You can’t use the Quick Look preview in iPhoto albums, more’s the pity.
That's got us halfway to the goal - we've got an animation, and we know how it moves. 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. Next: make a movie file of your animation using a free open source program.
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