What Is FrameThief?

FrameThief is the premier solution for animators on the Macintosh platform. FrameThief features a rich tool set for the creation of high quality animation with ease, versatility, and speed. The basic functionality of FrameThief is that of a video frame grabber, but the program builds upon this functionality to provide tools specific to animation. All you need to start animating with FrameThief is a video camera and a PowerPC Macintosh.

Is your camera compatible with FrameThief?

FrameThief's video frame grabber is built to be compatible with nearly all video capture devices that work on the Macintosh. From web cams to Digital Video (DV), the program is able to get high-quality still images previously unavailable from other applications.

FrameThief's plug-in style architecture allows for the development of plug-ins that support even more hardware video and still image source devices such as Digital Still Cameras. The current process for animating using Digital Still Cameras is long and tedious, FrameThief bring a new simplicity to the process.

Why should I use FrameThief?

Since FrameThief was designed for animation from the ground up, it is easy to use and is not burdened by video-editing functionality of other applications that are capable of frame grabbing. The program produces sequential image files for the animator to use in any fashion they choose, such as Photoshop editing of individual frames. The resulting frames can be easily converted into a QuickTime a movie using FrameThief's export capability* or a companion program called FrameSplicer.

FrameThief was designed with one main purpose in mind; to simplify the current animation process. Where the current software that supports single frame capture can perform an operation in three steps, FrameThief was designed to perform it in one or even automatically. FrameThief's features such as lightbox, rotoscoping, and the sketch tool can ease in shooting of even the most complex scenes in your animation.
FrameThief's interface is simple yet powerful. It provides all users, from beginners to experts, the ability to concentrate their full attention on the animation rather than the tool.

*Available in version 2.1 only