I finally found a Muybridge book at Borders. Its one othe the books that have photographs of undraped human movement of a series of photographs. The book I have is a large paperback. Colored blue and titled "The MAle and Female Figure in Motion. The book says says that the photos were taken at speeds up to 1/6000th of a second. But looking at the photos of the humans, I doubt that they were taken at such a high speed. Can any of you pro animators who have this book tell what the the frame rates actually appear to be? I'm just taking a wild guess but some seem to be around a photo every 15 frames. Input? JanP

Muybridge did his human (and animal) motion studies in the 19th century (late 1800's) before movie cameras were invented. His set-up was a series of cameras set in a row and as his subjects moved past the cameras, the shutters were tripped one after the other. Each 'frame' is a single picture taken by one camera. Amazingly, in todays age of super-fast photography ranging in the hundreds to even thousands of frames per second, his work is still a valid tool for studends of motion and animation. Hope this helps and answers your question. Walter

P.S. I can't lay my hands on my 40 year old hardcover copy of 'The Human Figure in Motion' so I can't give you more precise answers The last time I looked at this book was 20-25 years ago (memory is the second thing to go, you know). I doupt that the shutter speeds were anything close to 1/6000th of a second, maybe 1/600th. In any case, photographic plates were not sensative enough in those days to re-act to such a short exposure. Walter

i picked up a reprint of the Muybridge book a couple of years ago--quite a treat!--at Borders or some such. Don't be discouraged if you are looking. There's another out-of-print book (alas!) that Robin Wood turned me onto about a hundred years ago, and it was called Caught in Motion, and had a ton of stills of birds and critters in flight. Quite wonderful. Totally pre-3D. Probably worth searching for.

guslow, I have a Mrybridge book. It does say 1/6000th but that could have been a misprint. Its rather thin but mine too came from Borders. Yes I am familar as to how he did it. It was done when cameras were the new thing as I understand it.Basically what I am doing is scanning the images and creating individual images from each photo graph. I will then paste each of them into thier own 640x480 image. Then I will import the sequenced images as a background to aid me in animaiting my Poser figures. I was just hoping to get an average of what the timing might have been. I could try to analyze my own movement but that gets a little difficult. I need another pair of evyes to do that and since I am single and don't want to trouble friends with it it gest hard. I could also just go to the mall and observe things but then I would have to be working from memeory. nfredman, Thanks for the info. Hey, it might be at the Library. JanP

The Dover edition of Muybridge says that his exposure time ranged down to 1/6000 second, but the actual interval between frames was 60 frames per second at the fastest, up to several seconds per frame at the slowest. The index of this book gives the time interval for each sequence "when it is known", which seems to be only about a quarter of all the sequences. If your edition doesn't have any of this information, tell me which sequence you're looking at, and I can see if its interval is given in this index. ...ockham

Muybridge is still an excellent reference... and every animator in my circle has copies. Please note that because of the way the photographs were taken, you can't simply loop them to get an exact repeating cycle. However, you can get an excellent feel for the motion and redivide and spread it evenly over the number of frames you are working with. Years ago (King's Quest 4) I needed to animate a satyr and used the adjutant stork to get those backward-bending knees to work right (weight over the feet). So when you browse through the books, be creative with how you use them. :) Carolly

My dover edition is filled cover to cover of "60 photographic sequences". Well except for the title page and the Publisher Notes. They only tech info included in the Notes was that the grid wall consisted of grids lines marked in 5cm increments(approx. 2 inches). I don't really have a specific sequence in mind ockham. Just all in general. Yes Carolly, your right. I wan't going to sequnce them back to back. That would be far too fast motion. Many of the motions appear to have no real true way to determine a speed as some of the motions obviously involve the character having to breifly slow down befor continuing such is the case of "woman stepping up on a tressle, climbing down and turning. I suppose that for the most part all I can do is use my best guess at placement intervals. Thanks all. JanP