Dragon Force Induction notes

What is Dragon Frame? A piece of software that is used to create stop motion animations, which automatically detects the camera and has a timeline to easily see the photography you have taken.

• When adding camera to rigging, ensure that the camera is attached in the top indent to ensure that if you have to take the camera off the rigging, you can easily align the camera back to its original position.
• After opening up the software, chose new scene. 
•  At the top right of the window, there are two buttons, one which looks like a tv screen, is the animation view, the other looks like a camera, which is the cinematography pane.
• Dragon Frame allows you to change the settings of the camera it is connected to, you can change the shutter speed, aperture and ISO. You can also change the White Balance settings, changing the preset, for example, cloudy, flash and daylight, this changes the light with in the image. 
• Save files as a high JPEG, as for stop motion it requires alot of imagery and saving the file as a tiff will take alot of memory and may make the program run slow as it tries to comprehend the data. Feature films use RAW files.
• On the preview pane, the image is flipped, you can flip the image via the rotate button located beneath the preview pane. 
• You can change the exposure through the aperture in the camera settings. Do not over expose the image as this will cause lack of information and make the image grainy, if you need to make in slightly under expose the image as you can always the lighten the image in a different program, e.g. Photoshop.
• To check the focus in the image, click Focus Check, which will zoom into the image, and then you can determine whether it is in focus or not. 
• You can add guide frames, for titles or main action.
• Interesting for the frame rate, stop motion uses a slower rate at 15 to 10. I thought that this would not make the animation flow compared to 24 fps however it gives that aesthetics to the animation.
• In the timeline, you can onion skin, insert frame, duplicate and tween. 
• Scene menu allows you to add notes to the individual frames and also name the frames, much like layers in photoshop.
• The key pad used along with the software, allows you to take a shot, delete frames and onion skin.
• When exporting - file - export - export as an image sequence, in the pop up menu you can crop and scale the images. 
• Open up this image sequence in Premiere which will automatically make it into a movie file.

Dragon Frame Tutorials