StopMotion FrameCollectorStopMotion FrameCollector turns any paint program into an animation studio by adding a frame to your animation every time you save the image. This gives you a totally new way to do classic animation - with any paint program, many draw programs, and anything else that saves images to a folder. The frames can be JPG, TIF, PSD, or PNG images, and you can view them instantly as an animation with StopMotion FlipView or StopMotion FlipThumb. Briefly - you set up StopMotion FrameCollector to look at a capture folder on your system, and choose the type of image you want to collect - JPG, TIF, PSD, or PNG. When you're ready, you click on the Start collecting button, and StopMotion FrameCollector starts checking the folder four times a second. When an image file of the type you want shows up in the folder, StopMotion FrameCollector renames it into a sequentially numbered image file. You never have to enter the file names manually. You can set both the capture image type and capture folder path simultaneously by dragging a file from a Finder (Mac) or Windows Explorer window on to the file list area in the StopMotion FrameCollector window. StopMotion FrameCollector remembers the capture folder path and file type between sessions. Hover the mouse pointer over the controls and you'll see genuinely helpful tips. To StopMotion FrameCollector, a frame file is any file with a filename that's a six digit number from "100000" to "199999". (Followed by the selected file extension, of course.) An image file with any other name that shows up in the capture folder will be renamed to a frame file. There can only be one such frame in the capture folder at any time. If there are two or more, you'll be alerted and you won't be able to collect or capture frames. The Capture a frame button is there to accommodate paint programs that don't take kindly to having a file that's open renamed. So far, I've only encountered this with Photoshop on the Mac and Photoshop Elements on the Mac. (No problems with either of them on Windows PCs.) If you rename an open file, the file name in Photoshop or Elements gets updated to be the same as the file on the disk. With Photoshop on the Mac, the sequence becomes this. 1. Save the file into the Capture folder. I love to use StopMotion FrameCollector with Photoshop. I set up an action that saves a copy of the image into the folder that I've set StopMotion FrameCollector to monitor, and assign that action to a function key. Then, whenever I want to add a frame to my animation, I press the function key and a frame gets added to the movie. It's just like clicking the single frame release on a movie camera. I've set up StopMotion FlipThumb and StopMotion FlipView to work especially well with StopMotion FrameCollector. They can monitor the folder you've selected, and when a new frame arrives, they display it. Download and try StopMotion FrameCollector
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