Animators are gods. Foremost among them are stop-motion animators, because with their bare hands they bring dead things to life. – Henry Selick

With a Mac and Boinx iStopMotion Pro 2.7, you have access to stop-motion capture tools of the gods. Dr. Frankenstein never had it as easy to "bring dead things to life."

The DV Lunchbox from Animation Tools works was the unique groundbreaking standard for intuitive and easy frame capture. Meet the new kid on the block. The current iteration of iStopMotion Pro 2.7 brings powerful easy to use single keystroke capture software to your fingertips.

Boinx offers iStopMotion in three animated flavors:
iStopMotion Home ($49) Casual
iStopMotion Express ($99) Educational
iStopMotion Pro ($499) Professional

iStopMotion Pro's new capabilities include greatly increased resolution of 10,000 x 10,000 lossless compression to a QuickTime movie file, integration with Final Cut Pro and support of high-def (HD) capture.

One current major caveat is a lack of support for most Canon DSLR cameras working on MAC OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.5 and 10.6.6. Boinx, however, is working on an "elegant" solution to that problem.

Canon cameras do work with older operating systems. My review is based on working with digital video cameras (I only had access to Canon DSLRs).

The first, best and most important feature of iStopMotion is the immediate feedback from the instant playback. Combined with the onion skinning automatic default (or blinking), production flow is fast, intuitive and accurate, allowing me to focus on being creative, a joy to work with.

Layout of the screen workspace is divided on the right hand side with three functions: Recording, View & Compositing. The Recording function begins with your choice of many Digital Video & DSLR camera sources. The application defaults to the built-in iSight camera. 

The tilt shift function encompasses an ability to manually manipulate focus selectively in each frame. It makes a full size landscape appear to be a miniature and a miniature set appear to be a much larger space. Tabletop animators will appreciate this capability.

Rotoscope was originally invented and patented by Max Fleisher in the 1920s to create a hand-drawn frame-by-frame live-action reference of his brother Dave dressed in a clown costume. The live-action frames were traced onto animation paper to create the movements for Koko the Clown. The Rotoscope/Lip-Sync function continues to come in handy as a very useful tool to work with previously captured files as a reference.