Stop Motion Software and Camera

Hello all, I wanted to get the communities input on a couple things. My 3rd and 5th grade kids are both very interested in doing stop motion video. Currently they are using terrible amazon tablets to accomplish this. I was hoping some people would have input on a good but not super expensive camera, for smaller kids, to do this?

Also well as what opensource software is out there to help do the editing part for the videos. I see Kdenlive mentioned in another post as software that might work. Thank you in advance for any input.

If you want to expose them to the command line, there is ffmpeg. A one line command will take all of the photos in a folder, build them to the duration of your choosing and generate the video with any codec in any container you specify. Once the code is written, it’s automatic every time.

This would best be facilitated if the pictures are named sequentially as in:

  • filename-001.jpg
  • filename-002.jpg
  • etc

or:

  • 20211210_093112.jpg
  • 20211210_093210.jpg
  • etc

Put the images in a folder; cd into that folder and run:

ffmpeg -framerate 10 -pattern_type  glob -i "20211210_*.jpg" my_output.mp4

## framerate is the number of images you want displayed per second; so if you have 100 images in that folder, the resulting video will be 10 seconds long.

Let me know if there is further clarification I can add to this.

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Thank you, I will take a look at that!

Take a look at this thread:

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Thank you. Good information in there! I’m going to give Kdenlive a shot I think. I’ll put my KDE frustrations aside as this will be for my kids anyway not me.

This is what I use as well. Its super simple for sequences that need to be in reverse order as well. Then I just put video files in blender and edit from there.