Many frames, each on screen for a moment.
Stop-motion is a run of still photographs played quickly enough to read as movement — a puppet nudged between shots, a drawing redrawn, paper cut-outs shifted a little at a time.
ClapperBoard takes those frames, holds them in order along a timeline, gives each one a length measured in frames, and exports the result as a video or an animated GIF. Most of the work is in two things: getting the frames into the right order, and giving them a consistent length.
Turn on Stop-motion project, under Render options › Stop-motion in the control bar. This belongs to the project, so it travels with it.
Until it is on, everything else here is inactive, and the two menus behave differently about it.
The Playback menu keeps its four stop-motion commands — Show Onion Skin, Loop Playback, Step to Previous Frame and Step to Next Frame — visible but greyed out, so they can be found before the feature is switched on.
The Stop-motion menu shows only the Stop-motion project toggle. Its onion-skin and frame-length settings appear once the toggle is on.
Import the frames and they land on the timeline in filename order, which for a camera roll is usually the right one already.
When it is not, use the timeline's reorder mode. It drops the time axis and lays every frame out as a tile of equal size, which is the only practical way to rearrange a few hundred of them. Drag to move, ⇧-click and ⌘-click to select several, Delete to remove. See the timeline page for the details.
Frames are counted rather than timed. Frame length is set in frames — one to twelve — and what that comes to in seconds depends on the project's frame rate: at 24 fps, a two-frame length is a twelfth of a second.
Set all frames to N frames applies it across the whole project at once, which is the usual way to start: shoot on twos, set everything to two frames, then lengthen the few that want holding.
Because frame length is derived from the frame rate, changing the frame rate afterwards changes what a frame length means. Settle the frame rate before setting durations.
Onion skinning shows the frames either side of the current one as faint ghosts underneath it, so you can see how far something moved between shots.
Turn it on with ⇧⌘O, or from the Stop-motion menu, which also holds its settings:
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Previous frames | How many frames back to show, up to five. |
| Next frames | How many frames forward, up to five. |
| Ghost opacity | How strong the nearest ghost is — 20%, 35%, 50% or 65%. |
| Tint past / future frames | Tints earlier frames red and later ones blue, so direction is readable at a glance. |
Each ghost is half as strong as the one before it, so a stack of five fades away quickly rather than turning into mud. Raise the opacity if the furthest frames are too faint to read.
Onion skinning is a working aid and never reaches the export. Neither do the tints.
Space plays as usual. Two things help with a short animation:
| Shortcut | Action |
|---|---|
| ⇧⌘L | Loop playback — runs the animation round and round, which is how a cycle is judged. |
| , and . | Step back and forward one frame. |
The comma and full stop are the standard previous- and next-frame keys across animation and editing software.
Animated GIF is often the right format for a short loop, and it is one of the export formats. A GIF carries no sound, so any audio in the project is left out; for anything with a soundtrack, use MPEG-4.
Frame rate matters more here than in a project of held pages, since it decides how long each frame is actually on screen.