EyeCreate Stop Motion

I’ve been messing around with EyeCreate, the free PS3 movie editing suite that works with the PlayStation Eye. What I’ve found a bit strange is the lack of walk through’s, instructions, community sites or even a manual for it, maybe I’ve not looked hard enough. I am, by no stretch of the imagination, an expert at this but just wanted to post a very quick ‘How To’ for people like me.

The instructions, such as they are, are part of the program, just little tips as you go through, but you have to look carefully so here’s a quick guide to stop motion as that’s the most fun as far as I’m concerned, although I might do a bit of time lapse at some point.

The mistake I made at first was to try and do this by taking pictures and then stringing them together. Although this works, sort of, the big problem is that each photo last 2 seconds when put into a movie timeline. This can be cut down using the Split Clip function but there is a Stop Motion facility built in. To access this go to the Capture, you have 3 options here, capture a still, a movie or sound, go to movie.

Now you are in the movie section you need to get the options up by pressing the ’square’ on the controller. The are lots of things you can do when capturing video, different filters and effects but these need to be done when you capture, it would have been better if these effects could of been added after capture but there you go. For now go to Advanced Modes.

You have 2 options under Stop Motion, Standard and Skinning. Skinning is probably the best mode to use as after each picture it leaves a ghost of the previous image so yo have a rough idea of how much to move your object.

It’s obviously best to keep the camera static but moving the camera and the object can produce some interesting effects. Each frame you shoot, by pressing the X, is a 10th of a second. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that a movie of any length will take some time. Don’t be tempted to go down and have a look at your movie so far because when you go back to the stop motion it will start a new clip. This isn’t so bad as you can stitch them together in ‘Edit’ mode.

To export your clip so that you can view it from the XMB (Cross Media Bar) or put it onto a memory card is done, rather strangely from the ‘Capture’ section. Go down to the finished clip, listed at the bottom of the screen, and select ‘Options’ from here you can Delete or Export. This will create a folder under Videos in the XMB and you can do whatever you like to it.

The next EyeCreate post will be about Editing.