The easiest way to do stop-motion is with a video camera, using Frame Thief. But, if you want the higher resolution capability of a digital still camera, here’s some advice.

Before you import your photos, create a New Project in Final Cut Pro.

1. Under the Menu “Final Cut Pro”, select Audio/Video Settings:

a. Under the sequence presets tab highlight one of the ‘OfflineRT NTSC (photo JPEG)’ settings. Duplicate that setting. Select the duplicated setting and choose ‘edit’. Change the resolution to the size you want your video to be. Set the QuickTime video settings to ‘Photo – JPEG’ at 100% quality. (You can also just use one of the standard templates, but JPEG compression in those settings is awful.)

2. Under the Menu “Final Cut Pro”, select User Preferences:

a. Under the editing tab change the ‘still/freeze duration’ to 00:00:00:05. ( This may not be the best setting for your project so if your video seems too fast or slow adjust the still/freeze duration to match the speed you want. This will save you from wasting time and hard drive space manually adjusting the speed and having to render. Changing this setting will only change future imported images and will not effect images already imported.)

3. In the Finder on your computer, create a new folder with your digital pictures named sequentially (img_001, img_002, etc). (If you are importing directly from a digital camera then the Mac application Image Capture is a really easy way to download images to a folder and it should already be on your computer.)

Note - your computer’s sequencing may not be the same as Final Cut’s sequencing. For example: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12 may be in sequence when viewing them in Finder, but in Final Cut they may be sequenced 10,1,11,12,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 so watch out for that.

4. In FCP, got to menu File>>import>>folder and select the folder that contains your digital frames.

5. Create a new sequence and open it.

6. Drag the folder icon from the library into the timeline. It should line up the images by how they are named. If they are out of order there it is probably a sequencing problem (see step 3).

7. Export this sequence as a QuickTime movie. Now you have a high quality video file you can edit easily.