I've been using the HF100 for a month and really like its video quality.
I was wondering what it would take to do simple animation in-camera,
since ASAIK it doesn't have a single frame mode.

Has anyone else wanted to do animation with this camera?

I've been using the HF100 for a month and really like its video quality.
I was wondering what it would take to do simple animation in-camera,
since ASAIK it doesn't have a single frame mode.

Has anyone else wanted to do animation with this camera?
It can take still pictures. Do you need anything else for animation?

I guess I'm thinking of the old fashioned way, where you expose a single frame
at a time, and then play them back as an animated film sequence. If I take a series of stills (jpg), is there software that would concatenate them together
and produce a video file?

after effects

I'm considering getting the HF100 for stop motion animation. The notion of creating stop motion animation in high definition on consumer grade equipment is truly exciting! In addition, the 24p mode means you can shoot animation at 23.976fps and match full motion video to animation sequences, so long as you inverse telecine the full motion video segments. In addition, the HF100 lacks mechanical parts, aside from the zoom lens, which should hopefully make it last long for something as rough on a camera as stop motion animation. Right now I have several Sanyo iDshot still cameras, which are pretty unique in their ability to do stop motion animation, though they are showing their age, offering only 1024p at a 4:3 aspect ratio, which means no 1080p at 16:9 eye candy.

As for the HF100, I have yet to get my hands on one. My guess is that you'll want to use it in still picture mode. Taking frame by frame in video mode has become a very exotic, if not completely non-existant, feature nowadays. You can use freeware to turn a series of still images into a video file. I forget the exact program I use, though I'll look it up and post what it is.

The program you'll want for assembling videos from still images is pjBmp2Avi...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PjBmp2Avi

Download page...

http://www.divx-digest.com/software/bmp2avi.html