Time Lapse Effect

I am not sure if this was done with a still image camera or video camera, though I would like to create an effect like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxCUlvEkQDg&eurl=http://www.autoblog.com/
1. How could I take video in FCP and somehow delete every X frames to create an effect like this?
2. Anyone have any advice for doing this with a still image camera and bringing the images into FCP?
Thanks.

To add to what Patrick has posted. Just about all decent still cams these days have an app that will control the camera typically thru a laptop. There really are some outstanding examples of timelapse around. dvxuser.com has some notable ones - all shot with either Canons or Nikons, not to say the Oly's and Fuji's can't deliver the same.
Stock glass won't cut it btw (well it will, until you start to get picky), you'll need to invest in fast lens' and find the sweet spot for each given all the variables that can occur shooting timelapse.

Similar Messages

Can I make a time lapse effect from video footage?

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

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

Time lapse effect from video footage NOT from sequence of photographs?

Hi forum,
hard to find this with a search because most of the links are about using photo sequence.
Which effect can make the appearance of time lapse movies using video footage not photo sequence. Preferably I would like to have control on the speed at different sections.

If you want to simulate timelapse with standard video all you should have to do is speed up the footage. IOW, retime a 1 hour take to 10 seconds and it will look like timelapse.
If you want to simulate long exposure timelapse (like where the lights of cars are streaks) then you have a lot more work to do. You'll need to use something like the Echo effect and then adjust the timing. It would help if we knew a little more about your project. I've been shooting timelapse for more than 40 years and I've used about 100 different techniques. It's hard to replicate all but one of them using a video camera.

Editing clip times for bulk clips (time lapse content)

sorry if this has been asked tons of times, i searched but found no answer.
i'm doing a time lapse video, and have about 500 images uploaded so far. is there any way, after dragging the images down to the timeline, to edit them all at once? i've been doing each one by one, and it's a pain in the *ss.
any help is much appreciated!

G'day davidson,
The main reason I posed that question was that the folks that know way more than I do would've probably asked that question first. They may know of a better way of actually applying a single edit across multiple clips but I did find a way that may suit your purpose. With all clips in the clips pane go to Edit>Select All then drag to the timeline or clip viewer whilst maintaining Select All (i.e. all clips highlighted in blue). Go to Video FX in Editing and select Fast/Slow/Reverse and drag the slider toward Faster until you get the desired effect in the Preview and click Apply. I only did a short test over a few clips and it seemed to work and of course I wasn't able to set the clip duration but the slider would probably work fine for time-lapse effect. Obviously it was important to keep all the clips as Selected.

Time Lapse (or similar) effect

I have a question, it may fall under the "dumb question" category but I want to make sure i am thinking about this in the right way.
I am shooting a music video type of project for my church this weekend. I have been requested to produce a time lapse sort of effect, but this isnt the type of time lapse that you would associate with interval shooting (such as clouds, traffic, the moon, etc). What I am trying to do involves a scene in a bus station. The actress will be sitting along the wall. In essense, she will be motionless and the effect will be time passage as the crowd moves by her at a faster speed.
My initial thought is the have her sit there, specify that she not move at all, and shoot the scene for 5-10 min and then use FCP's "speed" function to just speed it up. Is this the best way to do this or is there a better way?
Thanks so much
Dave

I think at some stage you'll want to treat her seperately - so you'd need to roto her off on to a seperate layer/track. She then can be independant - have her stand up and walk away, slow her down or speed her up.
Lot of extra work to pull that off though. After Effects or one of the other compositors are your best bet. You'd then bring that back into fcp.
Don't know if you want to go to that extent, but ....

Exporting to After Effects for Time Lapse video

Using Lightroom 5, what are the best export settings for pics to be imported into After Effects in order to make a Time Lapse video?

Hi(Bonjour)
Export with quicktime conversion to a movie encoded in animation codec for video aiff 16 bit 48khz to get better result. You'll get a pretty large uncompressed movie file.
Michel Boissonneault

I am editing a video using CS6. I'm wanting to add a time lapse section of about 10 seconds or so.

When I bring the photos in, they are cropped. For example, the photos are of a building and sky. CS6 brings the photos in and has zoomed way in and cropped the building out to show only sky and clouds, so this is not as simple as using the zoom in/out function. The reverse is also true. My goal is to start the video with a time-lapse of 10 seconds but when I import the rest of the video clips, they shrink and assume the size of the photos. How do I change the photos and leave the rest of the video clips alone? Any help would be awesome. I am relatively new to CS6 and Adobe so I don't know if this is something that can even be done without upgrading to other programs.

No need for any magic or upgrades. You just need to read the help or watch some tutorials. To be candid, you pretty obviously haven't done that. Would take too long to tippi-toe you through everything, so by all means do a bit of reading up. E.g. images need to be prepared and resized suitably in Photoshop or you do your zoom pan and timelapse in After Effects...
Mylenium

Time-lapse flicker unchanged after Color Stabilizer

I shot a sequence of still photos of a cluster of roses blooming in front of a blue screen for creating a time-lapse clip, my first time to try that. I have an NTSC-sized comp that fills the frame nicely with just one of the roses. As expected, there is flicker due to imprecision in the camera's aperture, and the rumor is that AE's Color Stabilizer effect should fix that. I have Keylight to key out the blue, and also TimeWarp to speed it up because the rose took longer than I thought to open (although that's optional, as I can just make the clip at its original length and speed it up in PPro when I combine it with backgrounds), but I made sure to put the Color Stabilizer below those other effects in the timeline - that should mean it is applied first, right? The Color Stabilizer in is "Brightness" mode, and because the rose's petals move, I put the "Black Point" on the blue screen. But it still flickers - it doesn't look like there is any improvement over not using the effect at all. Am I doing something wrong? Naturally, if the Color Stabilizer was being applied after Keylight, it wouldn't work because the background would already be erased, but I think it should be applying it first. If I have to put the Black Point on some part of the rose, I will have to chase it with a bunch of keyframes, and it may still not work right. Recommendations?
I wish there was an effect that would simply look at the whole frame's brightness and smooth each frame to a running average of several frames in a row, but as far as I know, such an effect doesn't exist.
Additional info: AE CS4 on Windows XP. The photos were for 1 second each @ f-8 with a Canon Powershot S3-IS, if that matters.

If the lighting and background are constant, there's nothing for Color
Stabilizer to do, you should not have needed it at all.
That would be true if I was shooting with my video camera (which I have done for many a sunrise or other less-than-one-hour time-lapses. But the problem is that most still cameras do not keep their aperture set while waiting between shots, and even in manual shooting mode with a specific f-stop, there will be slight variations. The flicker isn't caused by my subject matter, but by my camera.
In my case, I'm actually pretty pleased that my camera did as well as it did, considering that it's not an SLR. The flicker is not nearly as bad as some examples I have seen on the web. For your benefit, I made two half-resolution Quicktime file of the same 4 seconds of the middle of the sequence - this one has no effects at all, and this one has not just one but two effects added that are rumored to be helpful in reducing flicker: Color Stabilizer in "brightness" mode with the "black point" on the background, and Auto Levels with a Temporal Smoothing setting of 1 second. (Even at half-resolution and only four seconds, the files are still over 14MB each, because they contain the full frame rate of 29.97 fps, so be patient with the download.) To my naked eye, I can't see much difference.
I'd have
processed the individual stills in a batch in Photoshop first, leveling
all variables.
How does one do that? I do have Photoshop (CS2), but I'm not much of a Photoshop expert and have no idea how to get it to compare levels between even two files, much less do such comparison in an batch fashion between thousands of files.
Thanks for the link. I didn't see anything directly relevent at first glance (deflicker discussions center around using VirtualDub on a progressive video file, but my source is 3000 still photos, my destination is interlaced DV-encoded video, and I don't really want to process and resave it multiple times if I can avoid it). But when I have more time, I'm sure I could learn lots about time-lapse in general by reading the forum threads.

How do you set up a TIME-LAPSE movie "before" putting into CS5 ??

Is there a way to put together a time-lapse sequence shot with a DSLR (comprised of many stills) into a movie at 30fps, BEFORE putting it into the Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 timeline?
QuickTime does NOT work because the images I need to use are TIFFs of much too high a quality for it to handle. I know, I've tried.
I know I can put the stills into CS5 as a series of shots lasting 1/30sec each to make a sequence, but that does not allow me to control the finished sequence "as a whole" for further altering like duration or other effects. Otherwise, I would have to make alterartions one frame at a time, which is ridiculously time prohibitive and not precise.
I'm using a Windows7 PC, and a Nikon D2X DSLR camera shooting in RAW.
Any advise and help is greatly appreciated.
Thanks.

First of all, Pr won't import the RAW images, so you'll need to pre-process them and convert them to a more "standard" image file format, such as TIF or JPG. I think you already realize this, but thought I'd just mention it.
When you want to import as a timelapse clip, check the "Numbered Stills" checkbox in the Import dialog, and select just the first image in the numbered sequence and click Open. This will create a clip using each image as a frame of the clip; you can select this clip, right-click, and select Modify > Interpret Footage to set the frame rate you like. There is also a check-option in the flyout menu of the Media Browser called "Import Numbered Stills as a Sequence" that does the same thing; just select that, import the first image, and the rest of the images will be imported as part of the clip.
Once this is done, the images will act as one clip, so a single effect will affect all frames in the clip.

I want to overlay elapsed time for 30 hour time lapse onto 30 minute video.

Title says it all. I have 92k pictures that I've put into an ~30 minute time lapse video. The pictures came from about 30 hours of recording. I would like to add a clock to show the time on to the video. I have sequences broken up by hours of the day, so I could create one hour segments very easily.
I've tried playing around with the timecode filter, but it doesn't do what I want it to (or I can't figure how to make it do what I want it to do).
Thanks for the help.

There isn't a built in clock effect in PrPro... timecode is the closest to it but probably won't work for what you want. After Effects may have one, but I'm not sure. There are probably some third party ones but I don't know of any off hand. Otherwise you may have to build and animate it yourself using titles or something like that. Again AE may help with that but I'm not certain. The time lapse part should be pretty easy. You can import them as image sequences if they're sequentially named, or else import them with a 1 sec default duration and add them to an appropriately sized sequence using automate to sequence or just by dragging and dropping.

New laptop workstation for time lapse editing

Hello all,
I'm in the process of buying a new custom laptop, and I seek your inputs regarding the specs,
The laptop will be based on the Clevo P370EM chassis, a pretty robust machine.
17.3" Full HD (1920x1080) Glossy 90% NTSC Color Gamut LED Backlit LCD, since I will be on-the-move most of the time
Plus I want a recommendation for a stationary, Full color scale display for stationary usage. And I plan to calibrate all this using the Spyder4 tool.
Intel Core i7-3840QM 2.8GHz, 8M L3 Cache, 22nm, DDR3-1600MHz, Quad-Core Mobile Processor
32GB (4 x 8GB) , PC3-12800, 1600MHz SODIMM
NVIDIA 680M 4096MB GDDR5 DX11 Compliant Video Card, I was flirting with the idea of getting the Quadro K5000M, but after a little research decided to go with the GTX. And CS6 does not support SLi so that's a pass too. Yet, still open for inputs.
Crucial m4 128GB mSATA Solid State Drive
Intel 240GB 520 Series SATA III 6Gb/s Solid State Drive Sandforce Powered, I read somewhere that Sandforce drivers are bad, any clarification on this one? This hard drive will be the primary one, for the OS and Software. Not a Brand-dedicated user, but I want something that lasts, I'm not looking for something that fails every now n then.
750GB 7200 16MB Cache SATA Notebook Hard Drive, this will be a secondary hard drive for general files and probably small projects. I tend to save each project on its own hard drive, so I guess 750 will be enough for my own entertainment.
The machine will be running windows 8 ultimate/7 ultimate, 64-bit.
This is my build so far, I'm still open for any suggestions.
My main usage is lightroom since I'm a photographer, but due to my inclination to time-lapses I will definitely use photoshop for batch processing about a 1000 hi-res photographs, then export to Premier to stitch it up, and probably will end up in After-Effect for Simple 3D work.
Thanks for reading and passing by,
Hazaa3 =)

Keep in mind the firmware on each of the SSD drives whether they have Sandforce or Marvell controllers are manufacturer, Model, and version specific. That means many of the Garbage collection/trim instructions may be far better on one SSD drive than another with the a controller from the same manufacturer. We have yet to see any performance degradation on the Intel drives like we have other SF drives. However we have seen several Marvell controller drives with issues or far less performance.
Eric
ADK

Creating a time lapse

I imported video from my newly bought HD video camcorder and was wondering if anyone out there knew how to make a time lapse from the video, as in speed up or down the time in which the video was taken. Just wondering if there is a way to do this in imovie rather than final cut.

I imported video from my newly bought HD video camcorder and was wondering if anyone out there knew how to make a time lapse from the video, as in speed up or down the time in which the video was taken.
Time lapse and fast/slow motion are different effects. In any case, no, you cannot really do them from within iMovie '08. You can either is iMovie HD here, or create the motion effects externally using an application like the JES DeIntelacer.
TUTORIAL 001: JES DeInterlacer
iMovie HD v6.0.4

Adjusting and matching time lapse exposure changes? (without deleting photo's)

Ok I am fairly sure there is no way around this but to do it manually... but just in case someone else knows a better way...
What's the best way to compensate for exposure changes captured during a long time lapse? (without deleting any images) (eg. a full day time lapse taken on a cloudy/sunny day)
Here's some more details...
I recently set up a 6hr indoor stadium time lapse during a cloudy/sunny day. All the settings were set to manual so that shutter (for motion blur), ISO, aperture (for depth of field) and white balance were consistent. I shot it in raw and it looks good... BUT every time the sun is covered by a cloud the exposure drops way down causing an overall 'exposure flicker' type effect when you put it all together.
So after searching for a while, I ended up manually adjusting over 1000 photo's, tweaking the exposure and eyeballing the histogram to be consistent (as 'Match total Exposures' didn't work in this manual mode instance). The result is 10x better, BUT I would love to be able to automate this process somehow as it would save me hours upon hours... any ideas? Any simpler ways?
The only automated solution I can think of at the moment is to set the camera to shutter priority in the future, but I'm not sure if the aperture / depth of field changes would cause problems when doing this.
Thanks for any ideas! I'm always learning and appreciate any input!

Codebreaker3 wrote:
I'm not sure that you will get good results if you try to normalise the exposure when dealing with large changes in luminance e.g. clouds moving in because that's the way the scene is at that time.
I understand what you mean, but in my case adjusting the overall exposures to be roughly the same made a huge difference and made the overall timelapse much better... 'smoother', less flickery to watch... it was probably because this time lapse was taken in an indoor stadium so the overall environment wasn't changing like it would in a cloud or nature timelapse. The problem was just that the overall stadium exposure would change according to the weather/clouds outside the stadium. I haven't heard of the Granite Bay Software so thanks for that link... I have tried LRTimelapse and it has a great feature to reduce the exposure changes for long term timelapses, but it also involves removing the images which have extreme exposure changes which is not what I wanted in this instance, I needed every image to remain in the timelapse. I think the manual method unfortunately is the best bet for this sceneriao, but I really appreciate all the ideas and suggestions!

Time lapse from stills

I am making a time lapse movie from a group of hi-res still images. The final needs to be HD to play looped on the clients HD TV.
We shot the stills only about 20secs apart. When I play the movie back, I get quite a bit of flicker. I do not beleive it is interlaced flicker I've been reading about. It is more of an exposure variance flicker. I've read that , that can be common on still camera time lapses due to the aperture is not exactly the same on all frames?? I hear there may be a plug in, Boris FX for after effects that will help with this??
Any help on this would be great!
Also, the test movies I've made with several different compressions are too soft.
I'm Pretty new at this. Again any help is greatly appreciated.

Since it sounds like you have After Effects, you may want to check out Stephen Schleicher's tutorial on removing the strobing from time lapse footage. It sounds like it's exactly what you're looking for. It uses the built-in Color Stabilizer filter to accomplish its task.
It's the first tutorial on the following page:
http://www.stephenschleicher.com/htm/tutorialsaftereffects.html

How to create a time lapse video in FCP7

Hi Guys,
I want to create time lapse video of my city which show the traffic in daytime and then gradually blends into the night, for this effect do i need to do anything expect change the clip speed once the video is imported from my video camera?
-A

My standard reply to timelapse inquiries is to post these links.
Pay particular attention to the top one:
http://timescapes.org/
http://www.gethincoles.com/
http://www.creativepro.com/story/howto/24670.html
http://www.haworth-village.org.uk/nature/time-lapse/thumbs.asp
http://www.macworld.com/weblogs/macosxhints/2006/07/timelapsemov/index.php
http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/2005/05/18/timelapse.html
http://www.timelapsedigital.com/
http://www.kenstone.net/fcphomepage/time_lapse_article/timelapse.html
bogiesan

Time Lapse Effect

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