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Saturday 5 April 2014

Getting Helium Frog Animator to work on Windows 8

Edit Sept 2015: If you have upgraded your system to Windows 10 and find that Helium Frog no longer works try deleting the file "CaptureFormatData.mt" from the program's folder.

Edit June 2018: Unfortunately, Microsoft are shutting down CodePlex (the website where the "beta" edition mentioned in step 1 is hosted). As a result, this fix may no longer work. I have contacted Martin Price, the author of Helium Frog and will post any further updates here. I'm glad this fix has helped a few people over the years, but Helium Frog really is very outdated at this point and where possible you should seek an alternative.

Helium Frog is a popular piece of  free frame capturing software among brickfilmers. It has a very large feature set with things such as onion skinning and even green screening. I have used it happily in conjunction with my Logitech c920 webcam for a few years now, however when I was lucky enough to purchase a shiny new Windows 8 computer a problem arose, this was 'Error code 01.01 - source setup problem'. I tried doing a number of things such as re-installing drivers etc but I had no luck, I also noticed I was not the only person to have this problem finding threads asking for help on Brickfilms.com, Bricks In Motion and the French forum Brick a Brak - the common problem between all of these seemed to be Windows 8.

Anyway, I am happy to say that I have found a solution to this problem for Windows 8 users, it is a bit odd and isn't the most straight forward solution so I decided to write a blog post explaining it.
  1. Download ZIP file for the 'beta' edition (version 2_06SW3) of Helium Frog from its source repository website here.
  2. Extract the contents of the ZIP file. Then navigate to the extracted file and click the folder inside called 'Package', then click the file titled 'setup'.
  3. A program to install Helium Frog should appear, follow through the default options in this wizard clicking 'yes' if any messages regarding 'Version Conflicts' appear.
  4. Click okay to close the setup when it is complete.
  5. IMPORTANT: Do not use the version of Helium Frog you have just installed or you will experience error messages and problems.
  6. Now you must download the ZIP file for the 'standard' version 2.06 of Helium Frog from the program's official website here.
  7. Extract the ZIP file and click the file titled 'Helium_Frog_2_06' and the program will work without the source error!
I'm not really sure why doing this worked for me but I hope this works for anyone experiencing the same problem as I did with Helium Frog. If you have any questions feel free to comment below and I'll try to help you.

By the way, once you successfully open the 'standard' version of Helium Frog you can uninstall the 'beta' version via Windows' Control Panel.

10 comments:

  1. The Helium Frog website won't load for me on Google Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. I have no idea why because all of my other websites are working fine. Is there another mirror on a different website for the "standard" edition?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The website appears to be up and running again now, I hope the issue has been resolved for you.

      Delete
  2. Thanks So much!!! I can't wait to use it!

    ReplyDelete
  3. I can not find CaptureFormatData.mt anywhere. The program keeps on crashing when I try to run it on windows 10. Think you can help me?

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  4. Thank tou very much ! So nice to you ! Enjoy animating ! :)

    ReplyDelete
  5. they're no folder called "package"...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hello! My brother helped me with this problem. All u had to do, was download the ZIP file from repository website. Then extract it. In this folder you will find another folder named "releases". Open it. Find folder "0" and the file in it. Add ( .zip ) to file 56ff4549-2749-4f16-a60a-f83b51676d1e. Open the new archive that u get. Extract it. Open new archive and find folder "Package".That's all!

      Delete
    2. Hi @Anatolio Romanov,

      I tried your solution but always get the same error :

      run-time error '~2147024894 (80070002)'
      Method '~' of object '~' failed

      Do you have some trick ?

      Delete
    3. what do you mean by add(.zip) to the file???

      Delete

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