I bought Dragonframe 3 recently from animate clay’s shop, they have a small discount on top so was the cheapest place to buy, and i help support a great community website.

Animation is going slower than i would like, but I’m putting it down to experience.
I’ve learnt that i really need to get a stage and tie down solution for my puppets, I’ve been making them quite quickly and on the cheap too out of aluminium foil and wire. So they’re not as sturdy as a good ball and socket armature and the legs are ever so slightly different lengths, anyway it would really be a great help in this to have a way of securing their feet, alas I have to deal with balancing and dodgy walks for now. A stage will be on my todo list for animation room this year.

So I’m taking my time, been learning the program a bit more it’s really nice and a great upgrade from version 2 (dragon stop motion, also had a name change) I love the tabbed interface, much better than before. So I’ve been playing with the audio editor, lip sync and x-sheets, which are like a spreadsheet of instructions for your animation (kinda like music notation but for animation) didn’t get much experience with them at uni. and they are used everywhere professionally so about time i did it.

Finding the lip sync good, but not as easy as a program I used to use called Papagayo, I used a Modded version tat added some features, improved others after the company stopped supporting it. but it’s still very early days for dragonframe 3 so all could change later on. I was impressed by the speed I recieved a response to a bug report i submitted which acknowledged my bug and said version 3.0.3 will be out soon to fix reported issues

Overall still very impressed with dragonframe, seems so much more powerful and smart than stop motion pro, which retails at a range of prices for various features. I hear SMP v7 is much better than 5 or 6 so haven’t made a good comparison but i did try it in trial, still preferred dragon as it’s mac and pc compatible with the same license and no features docked.

So far i have completed the audio of the animation and i’m quite happy with that, save for one slow down/jutter of the voice in editing and the first 11.5 seconds of the animation, i’m now filming the final scene as it’s the same camera angle and set and will go back to film the bits inbetween afterwards.