DV Info Net - animation with dv

I have recently done a shot that could be called animation on the XL1s. The shot is of a fuel filler cap on a car screwing in, apparently by itself. The way I did this was very simple, I composed the shot, hit record and then did up the filler cap about an 1/8th turn, moved my hand out of shot for a second, moved the cap another 1/8th turn until it was ready. To turn it into the final shot I simply selected the frames I wanted, i.e when my hand wasnt in shot, and dropped them into the timeline. It actualy seemed way too fast at first so I took two frames for each still and then made the sequence into a nest (Final Cut Pro - I think premiere has a similar function although I forget what they call it - it has been ages since I've used it!) I then made the nest slow motion and enabled frame blending, this gave a kind of half frame inbetween my frames that made it look more like it was real motion. The final shot works well.

Onto time lapse - the way I do this is to hook up my iBook to the XL1s with firewire and using software called BTVPro (http://www.bensoftware.com/) I specify a number of frames to be captured per minute and set it going. Premiere has its own built in interval frame capture mode so there is no need for third party software. The other, easy, way of doing time lapse is to simply roll the tap for the length of time you want to record and then capture it all and speed it up in your editing software, you have more control over the speed with this method but are limited to the duration of the tape.

Hope this helps!