Loud, Inc. has released ), which supports advanced features to create stop-motion or other animations, including onion-skinning and "flicker" camera previews, timeline with audio waveforms to sync animations, moveable markers and more. The full-featured camera-based animation solution for Mac OS X offers support for stop-motion, claymation, paper-animation, and time-lapse animations. (Pricing not available.)

Loud Animation Studio interfaces with your digital video camera and lets you capture images to build an animation. Users can view their movies in real-time as they capture images and edit them using a graphical timeline similar to those found in video editing packages. The timeline is build specifically for frame-based animation and reflects multi-frame grabs.

Loud Animation Studio also supports graphical waveform displays in the timeline so you can load audio files of any type into your animation and view the waveform along your video track to sync audio with video. The application can also record audio directly on top of the animation using the computer's microphone or sound-in port.




Loud Animation Studio supports onion-skinning and flicker camera previews. Onion-skinning displays the current camera preview transparently on top of the last frame in your animation so you can judge the distance you must move your characters before capturing another frame. Flicker alternates the last frame and the camera preview to better visualize animation.



Loud Animation Studio introdues markers, or visual cues that can be added on top of your animation to help align character or camera movement. Users can specify how many points to add along a visual cue such as a line. Users can also adjust correct or auto-set white balance on the connected camera. Animations can be exported to QuickTime with various compression formats for easy and high-quality distribution.

by MacNN Staff