It's a shame there's no control to restrict the range of brightness – off-white areas of the scene were made transparent when we just wanted to remove the green background. This is a tricky technique to get right but Claymation Studio does a reasonable job of easing the process, with a colour picker to define the colour to remove plus controls to specify the ranges of hue and saturation that are picked up.
There's also an option to overlay a bitmap image for reference via the Rotoscope tab, but this proved less useful.Ĭhroma keying lets users drop photos into the background, but it felt like more trouble than it was worthĪnother tab handles chroma keying – better known as the green screen effect – whereby a specified colour is made invisible to reveal a photographic background. The Key Drawing tool lets the user draw reference lines across the preview image, which proved useful for defining a path to animate characters along. It would be even better if it showed multiple previous frames, as this would make it easier to animate characters at an even pace. The Onionskin slider fades between the live feed and the previous frame, making it easy to see how much has changed since the last frame as well as to rectify accidental shifts in the camera position.
The frame rate can be set from 1fps to 30fps, letting users choose between creating smooth motion and getting anything finished this side of Christmas.Ĭapture simply involves hitting the red button to record a frame, but the software includes various tools to make it easier to create convincing animations. Frame sizes up to 1920x1080 are supported, and while most compatible cameras' resolutions are lower, the software defaults to each camera's top resolution. Quality was no better than most screen-mounted laptop webcams, but that shouldn't upset younger users too much.įortunately, the software works with any webcam, or any camera that's recognised as a live video feed by Windows, such as a FireWire MiniDV model, but these are now quite rare. We decided that our privacy probably wasn't under attack, and had no problems installing the USB dog-cam on a netbook using Windows' own drivers.
Claymation Studio will help parents sustain the myth that their kids' toys come alive at night
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