Animation

My animation setup for linux (ubuntu 9.10 i386).

I want to create animations from a sequence of capture images. This article describes the hardware and software set-up.

Camera

The Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000 Webcam is well support under linux works out of the box.

Controlling the Camera

To control the focus/exposure I am using guvciew. You need to run it a root to get all the features. Here is the app launcher and the controls you get.





























Software for capture and preview.

For assembling the images I use stopmotion

sudo apt-get install stopmotion

The video capture in stopmotion capture is done by specifying a command (a deamon that puts the webcam image into a JPG file which is then imported into stopmotion). Yo will need to install vgrabbj

sudo apt-get install vgrabbj

However the default command in stopmotion does not workout the box.
To make it work I replaced video import Start deamon command with

vgrabbj1 -f $IMAGEFILE -d $VIDEODEVICE -b -D 0 -i vga -L250

vgrabbj1 is a simple script that preloads a compatibility library.

#!/bin/sh
LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so vgrabbj $*

Put this script somewhere in your PATH for example /usr/bin/

I also replaced the stop deamon command

killall vgrabbj

stopmotion also uses a script to export the video (created from the captured jpeg images). The default is:

ffmpeg -r 10 -b 1800 -i "$IMAGEPATH/%06d.jpg" "$VIDEOFILE"

Assembling and editing the clips.

I plan to use kdenlive. The default version 0.7.5 did not work very well (100% CPU and crashes). Instructions to install the latest version are here

Other software

gimp-gap might be useful for constructing animations using moving layers etc but I have not investigated.