Virtual Dub

This month's PCPro mentioned VirtualDub and suggested it had good facilities for stop motion.

VirtualDub is a video capture/processing utility for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows platforms (98/ME/NT4/2000/XP/Vista/7), licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It lacks the editing power of a general-purpose editor such as Adobe Premiere, but is streamlined for fast linear operations over video. It has batch-processing capabilities for processing large numbers of files and can be extended with third-party video filters. VirtualDub is mainly geared toward processing AVI files, although it can read (not write) MPEG-1 and also handle sets of BMP images.

Here's a quick video to explain how you would use it.

Rendering and video editing

Following some helpful feedback from the people at Renderosity, I've produced a new version of the introduction to the Flea Circus Film. The depth of field options have been turned on in quick mode (rather than fully raytraced) which unfortunately loses the anti-aliasing on the edges of the case/backdrop but means that each frame renders in approx 4s rather than 3 minutes per frame required for fully raytraced depth of field. The current rendering stats are approx 2 hours to generate 50s of animation which in uncompressed AVI is about 1GB.
The film is in a new size format, it was suggested in 3D world (for the Tin Man film?) to render at 740x405 to get a 16:9 aspect ratio that could be displayed on most screens. I did this but then found that my video editing and conversion tools complained that this was a non standard size. As I was rendering out to uncompressed AVI files and then converting to WMV's for the editing, my solution was to then use the video convertor's letter box feature to resize to 720x576 by adding black bars top and bottom. This allows Premiere elements to be happy when outputting the results whilst also displaying well on my friends' EEE PC which will be used to show off the film at tomorrow's dinner.
There will be some frantic editing tomorrow morning, this intro will be followed by some draft version of the other three acts and hopefully some out-takes will be shown tomorrow evening at the PSTOIC Christmas dinner in South Kensington. Thanks to Youtube, the default picture for this clip is a lovely pink colour.