what software for timelapse/stop motion?

[Mariposa]

I am working on an animation project (first time!) based on photography and would like to know which software is the most appropriate for this task.

I've found several options that are avaialble online for free but I don't know much about them and I am looking for the opinion of people with experience in this area.

Thank you!

[Danack]

If you use windows then http://www.virtualdub.org/ will be a good tool to start with. It will do basic timelapses really easily and is the only program with a GUI that I can recommend.

If you want to do more complicated things then AviSynth is a really good tool.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AviSynth
http://sourceforge.net/projects/avisynth2/files/

It doesn't have a GUI, instead everything is done through script files - though the script files can be loaded through other programs as if the were a video themselves. e.g. you can load two videos in a script, blend them together, and then load the blended result into VirtualDub or Adobe premiere.

If you're on Linux or Mac then ffmpeg (http://ffmpeg.org/) is probably the best thing, though I haven't used it yet e.g.
http://programmer-art.org/articles/tutorials/ffmpeg-time-lapse

On Mac, Linux and Windows you can also use ImageMagick:
http://www.imagemagick.org/script/index.php

This is probably the most powerful image editor, however it is probably far more powerful (and so confusing) than what you actually need.