Stop Motion look Plug In?

We are trying to do a video that has a Stop Motion look, kind of like Radiohead's "There There". I know that it is mostly done in camera, but I was hoping that there was a plug in that will help accentuate it and maybe drop frames here and there while still remaining in sync. The director want's me to go through and just start chopping out a frame here and a 2 frames there, but I was hoping there was an easier way. A straight strobe looks too uniform. A visual is attached to see what we are going for.

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This doesn't look to hard to pull off. Just an old movie effect, vinyette and then some selective retiming to give that jerky effect. I don't think any of it was done in camera. Frankly FCP X is made for stuff like this. You don't need to loose any frames, you'll just be speeding them up and slow down as needed.

I don't know the nature of what you need, but in this video there isn't really anything in sync (but I didn't watch the whole thing). But if you do need to keep some things in sync, you'll need to of course separate your audio and then put some markers in crucial places. Then just go to town with retiming. I would use the range selection tool and then command-R to pull up retiming for the clip and try to get a feel for speeding up and slowing down. You'll want to experiment with the video quality of the retime, either normal or frame blending will work. So as you time the video track as needed, but then make sure you more or less hit your markers on the audio track.

Another thing you might want to try is the "Studder" filter in motion. Just create an effect for it in FCP X, and it might give you a little bit of extra flavor.

Sounds like a fun project. Enjoy!

You'll want to do the whole thing in Motion for sure. The problem will be that with the specific effect you want, its not consistent, there some randomness to the image sequence. Motion's effects aren't going to be consistent, but not to worry.

In Motion, import your clips. Apply the Strobe filter to a clip. Start with a Strobe Rate of about 24. You'll have a regular, very consistent strobe.

Now for the magic part. In the Animation Menu for the Strobe Rate parameter, go to Add Parameter Behavior, and select Randomize. See where we're going here? In that Behavior, just as a place to start, set Amount to 10, Frequency to 10, Noisiness to about 60. You can even click on the Generate button for Random Seed to get different inconsistent patterns.

Recap: Apply Strobe, the apply a Randomize behavior to the Strobe amount, to make it slightly inconsistent. With some work, you can tweak out pretty close to what you want, I bet. I'd like to see what you end up with.

But yeah, I'd just do it all in Motion, cause for this you'll want access to all the parameters. I tried making a Generator template for this, but, the Randomize controls don't seem to have any effect when you use it inside FCP X.

Strobe effect. Very cool.

I stand corrected! Do it in Motion.

Thanks for your inputs. I think you have the right answer BenB. Just did a test, also added a flicker, looks great. We are shooting it at 12 fps in 24 and then exentuating it in Motion. We are shooting tonight I will post an example of the effect with the footage sometime in the next few days.

Just for fun, since we're talking about visual effects here, I'll through in some Lagniappe here since you're shooting 24 and 12 fps. Drop a clip of each frame rate into a new Timeline (Compound or Project) created to be a custom setting for 60p fps. Once each clip is dropped in, highlight each, one at a time, go to the Modify menu, Retime > Conform Speed.

Watch what it does.

So i took the white background stuff into motion. Put a strobe, bad film (taking out the cheesy scratches and just using the saturate and jitter sliders), and randomizer effect on it. Then I rendered it out at 29.97 and then put it back in a 24 project.This is how it turned out thanks everybody for your input.

Video removed by author

Wicked awesome! Great tune, great video, great whole package!

Love it. Good job.

Hi,

I'm very interested by the effect described by BenB (strobe + randomize)
I've done it in Motion, but i have a strange behavior : with strobe + randomize in think after frame n i should have frame n+1 or n+2 or n+3... But sometimes i have frames n-1, n-2 ...
So when i play the movie it's like i have some backward...

Is it the normal behavior, and is there a way to only have frames after, not frames before ?

Thank you,

i generated such effect in Motion but for some clips it works really weird ... instead of just holding the frame it looks like it's playing forward-backward

in motion the effect works fine

any ideas one this?

verstaerker wrote: i generated such effect in Motion but for some clips it works really weird ... instead of just holding the frame it looks like it's playing forward-backward

in motion the effect works fine

any ideas one this?

depending on the framerate of the footage you need different version of the effect ... so i have now two versions .. one 59,94 and one 30 fps