Yesterday, I took advantage of the "Mac Heist" deal that's currently on. One of the programs included is iStopMotion - stop motion video software. I've wanted to have a go at stop motion animation since I did GCSE Art (I had wanted to animate the scene from the BFG where he blew dreams into peoples' bedroom windows). I still have the models I made for that somewhere, so perhaps I'll give that a go at some point. For now though, here's my first attempt:
My dad and I did take Morphy down to Priory Park and video him playing. I've now edited the footage together and set it to the 4ft Pimp track "No Ball Games". You can see the results for yourself here!
I had some trouble initially getting my Mac to read the MPEG2 files the camera produces - once I'd paid for the Apple MPEG2 decoder (why must I do this?!) I found that although QuickTime and iMovie could see the video, there was no audio. Having googled and found a reasonably comprehensive forum topic on the subject, I then downloaded MPEG Streamclip, which converts the MPEG2 files to DV format, which iMovie is then much happier with. The down side is that the DV files are about ten times the size of the MPEG ones.
Video formats always were a pain in the arse, and it seems only to have got worse over time. It seems virtually impossible to pick a format that is reasonable quality and will just work.