Creating Time-lapse Movies

To create a time-lapse movie from a series of photos, consider the following points:

• Put the cam on a stable tripod.
• It’s not necessary to use the full resolution of the camera. Full high-definition (HD) video only has 1080 vertical pixels. For a typical 16:9 aspect ratio, use 1920 horizontal pixels.
  As an alternative, you can batch resize the photos using an Automator action or an application like Adobe’s Photoshop. Also, it might be easier to shoot the photos in JPEG format rather than RAW if you do not want to edit them excessively.
• Set the camera white balance manually, for example to ‘shadow’ rather than using ‘automatic’ white balance.
• Set exposure to manual mode – otherwise the camera constantly adjusts the exposure for each capture resulting in flickering. Also, there will be a lack of recognizable brightness differences – e.g. of day and night if you shoot that long.
  For scenes with a lot of different moving objects, it may be more apropriate to drag the shutter, i.e. setting a long shutter speed to blur the objects.
• Take the pictures (at regular intervals). Many cameras allow to do this automatically using an intervallometer.
• In Apple’s QuickTime Pro, it’s possible to open a folder as an image sequence and to build a video out of it. Choose the frame rate. For a 1-minute-movie with 25 frames per second, you will need 25x60  = 1’500 images.
  Export the movie in h264 format (or any other format and frame rate you like). Edit in iMovie, add sound. Now the video is ready for upload to vimeo (which allows HD!),  YouTube or Flickr.

It’s also be possible to create such time-lapse videos with Apple’s iMovie – but I found it a bit hard to use for this purpose. iMovie is however very useful to edit the resulting video, for example if you want to add a title and music. For Windows users: Photolapse.

Mac: Gawker is an opensource application for Mac OS X that creates time-lapse movies using a webcam or built-in iSight camera. It can also record screenshots of your desktop at regular intervals. iStopMotion is similar and has an enormous list of features. Another one is BTV Pro. And iShowU records anything that moves on your screen…

This entry was posted on Friday, October 17th, 2008 at 15:15. It is filed under Gear, Photography, Video & Multimedia and tagged with camera, feature, iMovie, intervalometer, Quicktime Pro, time-lapse movie, Video & Multimedia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.