An iPhone Stopwatch for Animators | Cartoon Brew: Leading the Animation Conversation

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An iPhone Stopwatch for Animators

February 23, 2009 7:33 am

Program by Randy Cartwright

Veteran animator Randy Cartwright, who is currently working on Disney’s The Princess and the Frog, has released a useful iPhone application designed specifically for animators called the Animation Timer. He describes on his website what it does:

Timing is very important in animation. In order to animate convincingly you must know how many frames each part of an action takes.

Animators can use a stopwatch to time out actions but there has always been an annoying problem. Stopwatches show time as 1/100ths per second but movie film runs at 24 frames per second. To find out how many frames you need to do a tiresome calculation containing 41.66667 each time.

I’ve always wanted a stopwatch that would show the time in exactly the format I need so I decided, what the hey, I might as well make one, so here it is.

For more details, visit Randy’s Animation Timer website. The application is available for $2.99 on the iTunes store. Search for “animation timer”.

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8 comments posted in Internet/Blogs

« « Academy Awards Talkback | Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto » »

02/23/09 9:03am	Chris Sobieniak says:
	It’s times like this I wish I had an iPhone! Still rather be left in the dark than to be tied to the system I say. This is still quite a nifty and valuable too Randy’s cooked up, would’ve loved something similar to this for another platform or system.
02/23/09 11:04am	OtherDan says:
	I might buy an iphone now.
02/23/09 12:00pm	Bitter Animator says:
	A great idea for people just getting used to seeing things in frames. Could it end up a trap? I don’t know. Maybe not. But I’d say a lot of animators know how many frames an action takes just by, well, I don’t even know - just knowing. And their gut may not always be true to life but often can be much more interesting. Still, this could be really handy in certain circumstances and it’s great that someone out there is working on things like this. I wish there had been an iPhone back in the day with an app to actually make me draw better. The Sketches app isn’t quite helping.
02/23/09 1:13pm	Corey says:
	This is awesome. I remember when my fiance got an iPhone the first app I searched for was a footage calculator. Perfect !
02/23/09 6:14pm	Fred Cline says:
	Go Randy!!!
02/24/09 8:57am	Paul Greer says:
	auugh!!…want one.
02/24/09 12:16pm	Kate Burck says:
	I’m purchasing as I type. I’m always on a hunt to tie animation to my itouch, and all the flipbook-like programs have fallen pretty darn flat. This could come in incredibly handy.
02/24/09 11:59pm	Bill Field says:
	Bought it after reading- pretty simple and very accurate- Thanks!

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