Claymation: what software to use?
 

Hi,
I recently saw a very impressive claymation clip.
Check it out here: http://spikedhumor.com/Article.aspx?id=2160

What is the process of capturing and editing this type of work? Most logical(as it seems to me) is using a digital camera and capture a frame each time there is a change in the scene. Also, what software would you use to merge all the frame together? I know Premiere can do it, but thats a lot of seperate frames to process.

Shake works but that might be a little beyond the average uerds price range.

Anyone else got any interesting input or methods of how to create nice claymation?

there are thousand of programs able to merge a serie of pictures into a movie.
premiere is nice (especially if you are doing all the editing with) but you can even find free utilities to do this.
you will just need at worse to rename your pictures to get a suite of numbers.
here too, you could find a lot of free/cheap utilities doing this (as Lupas rename)
if you use a digital camera, just take care to use it on manual setting (automatic could give you very different exposure from one frame to another) and do not shoot with too big resolution (2 Megapixel is a lot already).
Try to get several cameras to shoot the same scene from different point of view without having to move the cams.
You can avantageously use the methode of interpolating pictures (usually used to create slowmotion) to double the final number of picture.
for good lights, you can find in surplus stores some optical fibers that allows precises spotlight with advantage of cold light.(see surplussched)

If you were on the Mac....

http://www.istopmotion.com/

This seems like a pretty mature program.