Any easier way to blue screen stop motion animation?

We are using a digital camera to capture stills for a stop motion animation. Obviously, there are a large number of stills for every few seconds of real time action. We are using about 12 stills to capture what will be 1 second of real time action. Before shooting each still image, we reposition the animation characters on the stage in the normal stop motion technique.
We shoot the stills with a simple solid colour background. When we have the animation action scene shot, we open all of the images in Photoshop and select the background and create an alpha channel for the background area.
Then we import all of the stills into Premiere Pro and knock out the backgrounds of each still using the alpha keying filter, so that the desired background shows through from the lower track.
As you can see, this process is incredibly tedious!
We can’t use the batch action option in Photoshop since each still has the animated characters positioned slightly differently.
Is there an easier way to accomplish this?
If we brought the digital stills directly into Premiere Pro first, we could use the colour key filter to knock out the solid colour backgrounds, but this is sometimes not such a clean result on the edges of the shapes and requires fiddling with the keying controls. Also, it has to be done for each clip on the timeline anyway.
Does Premiere Pro offer some automation to this process? Could all of the stills on the timeline be somehow grouped and worked on all at once? I am aware that if we connected a camcorder to a computer and used something like Sceneanalyzer, each capture would be saved as part of a single avi file and this would make the process much faster, but unfortunately, for this project we are unable to do the filming where the computers are and are forced to use digital cameras instead. These are my students’ projects and they are not able to capture from a camcorder connected to a computer, and some don’t even have a camcorder to use anyway.
I would greatly appreciate it if anyone can advise me on some way to make this process work faster.
Thanks a lot.

We are using a digital camera to capture stills for a stop motion animation. Obviously, there are a large number of stills for every few seconds of real time action. We are using about 12 stills to capture what will be 1 second of real time action. Before shooting each still image, we reposition the animation characters on the stage in the normal stop motion technique. We shoot the stills with a simple solid colour background. When we have the animation action scene shot, we open all of the images in Photoshop and select the background and create an alpha channel for the background area.
Then we import all of the stills into Premiere Pro and knock out the backgrounds of each still using the alpha keying filter, so that the desired background shows through from the lower track.
As you can see, this process is incredibly tedious!
We can’t use the batch action option in Photoshop since each still has the animated characters positioned slightly differently.
Is there an easier way to accomplish this?
If we brought the digital stills directly into Premiere Pro first, we could use the colour key filter to knock out the solid colour backgrounds, but this is sometimes not such a clean result on the edges of the shapes and requires fiddling with the keying controls. Also, it has to be done for each clip on the timeline anyway.
Does Premiere Pro offer some automation to this process? Could all of the stills on the timeline be somehow grouped and worked on all at once? I am aware that if we connected a camcorder to a computer and used something like Sceneanalyzer, each capture would be saved as part of a single avi file and this would make the process much faster, but unfortunately, for this project we are unable to do the filming where the computers are and are forced to use digital cameras instead. These are my students’ projects and they are not able to capture from a camcorder connected to a computer, and some don’t even have a camcorder to use anyway.
I would greatly appreciate it if anyone can advise me on some way to make this process work faster.
Thanks a lot.

In message <dzy5e.16488$>, Luis ORTEGA
writes

We are using a digital camera to capture stills for a stop motion animation.
Obviously, there are a large number of stills for every few seconds of real
time action. We are using about 12 stills to capture what will be 1 second of real time action. Before shooting each still image, we reposition the animation characters on the stage in the normal stop motion technique. We shoot the stills with a simple solid colour background. When we have the animation action scene shot, we open all of the images in Photoshop and select the background and create an alpha channel for the background area.
Then we import all of the stills into Premiere Pro and knock out the backgrounds of each still using the alpha keying filter, so that the desired
background shows through from the lower track.
As you can see, this process is incredibly tedious!
We can’t use the batch action option in Photoshop since each still has the animated characters positioned slightly differently.
Is there an easier way to accomplish this?
If we brought the digital stills directly into Premiere Pro first, we could
use the colour key filter to knock out the solid colour backgrounds, but this is sometimes not such a clean result on the edges of the shapes and requires fiddling with the keying controls. Also, it has to be done for each
clip on the timeline anyway.
Does Premiere Pro offer some automation to this process? Could all of the stills on the timeline be somehow grouped and worked on all at once? I am aware that if we connected a camcorder to a computer and used something
like Sceneanalyzer, each capture would be saved as part of a single avi file
and this would make the process much faster, but unfortunately, for this project we are unable to do the filming where the computers are and are forced to use digital cameras instead. These are my students’ projects and they are not able to capture from a camcorder connected to a computer, and some don’t even have a camcorder to use anyway.
I would greatly appreciate it if anyone can advise me on some way to make this process work faster.
Thanks a lot.

Luis- The site you need to visit is: http://www.stopmotionanimation.com/ where your questions can be answered in the forums (check the drop down list in the lower right corner of page for Special FX, etc.). Membership is free.

-Lucrezia (about to start my own stop mo project…)

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