iMotion Pro
Shoot a masterpiece frame by frame
$3.99 Developer Fingerlab, fingerlab.net Platform Universal Requirements iOS 8.0 or later
If you’ve tried to make stop-motion animation, you may have been daunted by the patience needed to do it justice. Reproducing Wallace and Gromit or even the 1933 version of the ape in King Kong takes lots of time and a steady hand. But with iMotion Pro for iOS, much hassle is removed.
The latest version, 4.0, is highly intuitive. Start a new movie and you’re taken to the settings page where you can choose to shoot square or widescreen footage, in 720p or 1080p, by rotating your device. You can select manual control with a single tap (the go-to for stop animation), and alter the threshold of the microphone to capture audio.
There’s an option to shoot time-lapse footage, which is great for speedily moving cloudscapes, and the shutter interval can be set from as short as 0.1 seconds up to an entire day. It’s all very slick.
Such ease of use extends to the shooting of video. You’re given access to a range of tools such as a light, a series of grids for lining up your shots, and both exposure and white balance controls. While you can control focus manually, autofocusing works well in adjusting the camera before snapping away, and there is no limit on how long movies can be. By using a tripod you should get some particularly sweet results.
The accompanying iMotion Remote app, which is free, enables you to use another iOS device to control the camera. You can control everything from there, from the focus to the exposure to the grid, which makes iMotion Pro far more convenient and useful.
The app is strong for editing, too. Aside from speeding up footage and deleting and reordering frames, you can add images and audio. Music from your library must be saved to your device and be unprotected by DRM, though.
The app’s new ability to duplicate and rename your videos is welcome, and the export facilities remain strong thanks to a wealth of options. All in all, iMotion Pro is a fun and highly usable creative tool.
the bottom line. With simple methods of motion and time-lapse capture, and intuitive frame-by-frame editing, iMotion Pro will have you churning out stunning animations in quick time.