Frameographer - Stop Motion & Time-Lapse Gets An Update
by Tommy Ly
June 6, 2012
Studio Neat, the team behind the Glif and Cosmonaut (see our reviews here and here, respectively), have just released an update to Frameographer - Stop Motion & Time-Lapse (formerly known as Frames).
If you haven't heard of Frameographer, it's an app for, you guessed it, creating stop motion and time-lapse videos right on your iPhone. For stop motion videos, Frameographer allows you to manually take a series of photos, while for time-lapses, the app does all the work itself after you set how often it should snap a photo. Once you're done shooting, you can control how many frames you'd like per each second of video. The changes take effect immediately and you can preview your video before exporting it to your camera roll.
Frameographer's v1.3 update brings two new features:
While the Audible Countdown feature is pretty self-explanatory, the new Smart Zoom feature isn't as simple as it seems. Dan Provost, co-founder of Studio Neat, describes Frameographer's Smart Zoom on his blog:
- Smart Zoom. On the Capture Screen, you can now pinch to zoom up to 2x, without degrading image quality.
- Audible Countdown. A new option has been added to the Time Lapse options menu, allowing you to hear a 3 second countdown before each image is captured.
On the Capture screen, you can now pitch-to-zoom, just as you would in the native Camera app. There is one key difference between these two zooms, however. In the native Camera app, any zooming done will degrade the image quality, as it is simply enlarging and cropping the digital image. Frameographer, however, uses what we are calling “Smart Zoom,” which preserves the image quality. Allow me to explain. Movies exported from Framographer are 1080p resolution (1920 x 1080 pixels). The iPhone 4S camera captures images at 3264 x 2448 pixels. Because a full resolution image has more pixels than needed for a 1080p export, zooming in simply resizes the viewport, but keeps the capture at full quality. In essence, when you are zooming in Frameographer, you are not enlarging a digital image, you are changing how the image is cropped.Smart Zoom is smart, indeed. I wouldn't be surprised to see other apps (especially video apps) adopt a similar feature. Frameographer - Stop Motion & Time-Lapse is available in the App Store for $2.99. The price may be a bit steep for an app like this, but the app's simplicity may be well worth it. What are some of your favorite apps for making stop motion or time-lapse videos?