Can I make a time lapse effect from video footage?

Question

Is there a way to easily create a time lapse effect from video footage in Final Cut Pro 7?
I have hours of footage - too many hours to just do speed changes.
Is there a way to automatically grab a frame and hold it for a half second or so every 30 seconds?
Thanks,
LD

Answer 1

Lynn Diana wrote:
Is there a way to easily create a time lapse effect from video footage in Final Cut Pro 7?
Depends what you mean by "easily".
I have hours of footage - too many hours to just do speed changes.
I think doing via speed changing may be the easiest way to do this. Once the footage is ingested, get it to the timeline and do your speed up. At least this gives you the option of trying different speeds to get the effect you want, and the option to vary the speed as needed.
Is there a way to automatically grab a frame and hold it for a half second or so every 30 seconds?
Yes, but it somewhat complex. You need to buy an app from the app store called SnapMotion 2 (which I think is around $3.99).
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/snapmotion/id548959270
SnapMotion allows you to take a video a file and pull still frames at interval you specify and in the format a frame size you choose, and save them as individual images.
So you would set up the interval you want (say 30 seconds) and SnapMotion will go through the file and pull an image every 30 seconds. You would need to do that to all your files.
(I have never done this with a file that was longer than 10 minutes, so you should check with the developer and see if it will work with very long - multi hour - clips).
Once you have all your pulled stills, then open QuickTime Player 7 and import the still images as an image sequence.
Once you have the image sequence built in QuickTime, export it in the codec you want to use in FCP.
MtD