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Linux Stopmotion for Grandpa testers

Linux Stopmotion is a Free Open Source application to create stop-motion animations. It helps you capture and edit the frames of your animation and export them as a single file.

At the moment it is the most flexible framegrabber for Linux. It easily supports different capture and export tools. For this reason it is now being used to experiment advanced grabbing.

This tutorial is meant to help you

to use the current Stopmotion at best, working around bugs and out of date tools
to test the new experimental features

Some tips before starting

I recommend you don't use Unity as desktop environment, even if it is the Ubuntu default DE since 11.04. Why?
I like Unity very much but only for office-like tasks. It's fast and cheerful.
For video production you need a simpler interface, with a sufficiently high contrast and no distractions. Besides Unity themes are so stylish and soft that some buttons in the Stopmotion interface are hard to see.

I recommend you use Xubuntu or Ubuntu Studio for video production. Both use XFCE as destop environment.

How to turn your Ubuntu into Xubuntu

Your Ubuntu system can easily support both Unity and XFCE. At login you can choose which desktop environment to use for the current session.

To install Xubuntu use this terminal command:

sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop

I recommend you keep Nautilus as file manager, instead of Thunar (Xubuntu default file manager) because Nautilus has many features very useful for graphics and video production.

Too set Nautilus as defaul file manager in Xubuntu go to
Applications Menu -> Settings -> Settings Manager -> Preferred Applications -> Utilities and select Nautilus in place of Thunar.

Happy grabbing!

Thanks to

Herman Robak, Martin Herren, Graham Evans