• Joined: March 11, 2009

Topic: Capture Software? Helium Frog, MonkeyJam, or "Other"

I've been brickfilming for about 2 1/2 years now, all on the same digital camera: a Pentax Optio M30. I started at about 1 FPS, and am now up to about 10 FPS. Now that I want to make the jump to 15 FPS, I figured I'd ditch the digital camera and floor mounted tripod and get a QCP9000. I like the webcam idea because I can lock down the camera better,  onion skinning, and I can also film more at "Minifig Level". (Check out my videos to see why!)

Originally, I thought I'd use FrameByFrame on the Mac, but seeing as the QCP9000, nor any other webcam seems to have manual focus on OSX, that renders the QCP9000 on OSX worthless. I have bootcamp, so I'm able to access Windows. So, now I figure I'll just use Windows for frame capture, and OSX for editing. So, my question is what frame capture program should I use? MonkeyJam doesn't have Onion Skinning, so it's almost out of the picture. Helium Frog looks good, but I've seen a lot of complaints about it. I was looking though the free software list, and StopMojo looked good also... My only "real" requirements are that the program is free. What are your suggestions?

Thanks in advance!

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Re: Capture Software? Helium Frog, MonkeyJam, or "Other"

Download them both, try them out and pick the one you prefer or just choose which one you feel like using at the time.

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Re: Capture Software? Helium Frog, MonkeyJam, or "Other"

Monkeyjam RULES.

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Re: Capture Software? Helium Frog, MonkeyJam, or "Other"

Bobo590 wrote:

Monkeyjam RULES.

... arguments for your statement? mini/confused

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Re: Capture Software? Helium Frog, MonkeyJam, or "Other"

I think you should use Monkeyjam

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Re: Capture Software? Helium Frog, MonkeyJam, or "Other"

When I downloaded MonkeyJam the footage, when recorded back, was choppy and inconsistent - does anyone else have that problem?:/

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Re: Capture Software? Helium Frog, MonkeyJam, or "Other"

This is usually a problem with trying to playback huge uncompressed footage - it doesn't run very smoothly. There's no real way to fix that problem apart from compressing your stuff first or something, I dunno.

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Re: Capture Software? Helium Frog, MonkeyJam, or "Other"

problems with both:
Monkey jam has no onion skinning

Helium frog- (well for me) you can't edit a single frame.. you can only edit the entire video to add effects (i only have a photo editing software, not video editing software for effects)

Whenever i go to the captured frames section in the helium frog folder- it's only video files... not a single frame...
If i'm wrong, can someone tell me?

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Re: Capture Software? Helium Frog, MonkeyJam, or "Other"

Muszynski Productions wrote:

problems with both:
Monkey jam has no onion skinning

Helium frog- (well for me) you can't edit a single frame.. you can only edit the entire video to add effects (i only have a photo editing software, not video editing software for effects)

Whenever i go to the captured frames section in the helium frog folder- it's only video files... not a single frame...
If i'm wrong, can someone tell me?

mini/confused I edit frames in Helium Frog all the time. Just go into the Helium Frog settings and select the image output as jpeg. This makes it so that Helium Frog can re-render the movie from the frames. Make sure you have jpeg frames though, it only works with that file type.

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Re: Capture Software? Helium Frog, MonkeyJam, or "Other"

oooooooooo! cool! then defiantly go with helium frog microapple1996

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Re: Capture Software? Helium Frog, MonkeyJam, or "Other"

Lgmaster wrote:

When I downloaded MonkeyJam the footage, when recorded back, was choppy and inconsistent - does anyone else have that problem?:/

no i dont have that problom

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Re: Capture Software? Helium Frog, MonkeyJam, or "Other"

Thanks for all the feedback! I think I'm going to download both. I'm swaying towards Helium Frog for the onion skinning though.

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Re: Capture Software? Helium Frog, MonkeyJam, or "Other"

Lgmaster wrote:

When I downloaded MonkeyJam the footage, when recorded back, was choppy and inconsistent - does anyone else have that problem?:/

Choppy playback is usually because your computer cannot cope with the amount of video data you are asking it to compute. This can be due to the following.

1) Your hard drive is very slow.
2) Your processor is not powerfull enough.
3) Your video is not compressed enough or not compressed at all.

My guess is that it is 3) . When you output your animation from Monkey Jam try choosing DivX or Quicktime etc. This way the file is smaller and reprocessing it for playback may be better. You have to experiment with compression settings to get the best quality that will playback well.

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Re: Capture Software? Helium Frog, MonkeyJam, or "Other"

UniLego wrote:
Muszynski Productions wrote:

problems with both:
Monkey jam has no onion skinning

Helium frog- (well for me) you can't edit a single frame.. you can only edit the entire video to add effects (i only have a photo editing software, not video editing software for effects)

Whenever i go to the captured frames section in the helium frog folder- it's only video files... not a single frame...
If i'm wrong, can someone tell me?

mini/confused I edit frames in Helium Frog all the time. Just go into the Helium Frog settings and select the image output as jpeg. This makes it so that Helium Frog can re-render the movie from the frames. Make sure you have jpeg frames though, it only works with that file type.

How do you make Helium Frog render the movie from the frames? Can you explain more, I don't really understand. See,  I want to edit individual frames to make lego fly and then import the image file to Helium frog. I can't seem to find where you can import the image file. When I close Helium Frog, I do get individual frames but I can't get the frames into Helium Frog again. I want to use Helium Frog to render out my video because it's more smoother than Monkeyjam. Reply back please.

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Re: Capture Software? Helium Frog, MonkeyJam, or "Other"

I think Monkeyjam is best. But it does not have onion skinning, and it can be very complicated.
I think that the best would be to buy some professional software, like Dragon, og Stop Motion Pro.

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Re: Capture Software? Helium Frog, MonkeyJam, or "Other"

I use Anasazi I can't afford cool software Like Stop Motion Pro and found Anasizi before Monkeyjam and couldn't quite adjust mini/tongue

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