Time Lapse Video

[Zholl]

I'm working on creating a time lapse video of my team working in the shop. The pictures are going great, and I've got enough to start putting the movie together now. What's the best way to go about stringing the shots together? I'm planning on using my personal system with Adobe Premier, but I'm not sure what the best settings for framerate and such would be for this project. Is there anyone out there who's done this before and could help a newbie out?

[BuddyB309]

ok so assuming you took photos with a still camera and all of your footage is in pictures. The best way to do this is an image sequence folder/file. What you need to do is take your pictures and name them "picture001" "Picture002" "Picture003" and so on. Then you drag the folder into premiere and it will recognize that its a image sequence folder. You should have nothing else in the folder expect those files. and then it will play the frames like a movie at 30 fps. If this is too fast then you need to change the frame rate. Right click on the file in the bin and go to "Interpret footage" and change the frame rate.

I don't know if there is an option to mass rename a whole bunch of files with numbers at the end of them. So if you don't know of one I highly recommend that you not do the procedure above if you have more than 100 photos.

next best option is to grab yourself a can of soda or two. Put on some good music, cause its gonna take a while.

Drag all the pictures into premiere then manually place them into the time line and cut them down to a frame or two. then when you have them all in order and on the time line create a new sequence and title it "Time Lapse" then drag the sequence title "Sequence 01" from the bin into the Time Lapse timeline. Now you can speed up the video and slow down the video by right clicking on the video in the timeline and choose speed/duration.

OH!!! I just thought of something else that may help.

Download hypercam. Get all the videos in order then open up windows picture viewer by clicking on a file. Set the output video file then run Hypercam to capture your screen as you manually flip through the pictures. Now take your video that you made with hypercam and import it into premiere. Crop out the window so all you see are the pictures and speed of the footage. BAM!! timelapse. Hoowahh!!! I am good!

[Schnabel]

I don't know about in adobe, but I know that in final cut you can do a batch import, and then drag them all to the time line at once. Then I normally select the entire time line and change the speed of every clip at once. To do this in final cut, you press Command+J which might be ALT+J in premier. The general rule of thumb for a stop motion is 4 frames per picture, but that depends on how many pictures you are doing per day and how long you want the video. Hope this helps.

[BuddyB309]

Originally Posted by Schnabel

The general rule of thumb for a stop motion is 4 frames per picture, but that depends on how many pictures you are doing per day and how long you want the video. Hope this helps.

I have to disagree with you on frame rate. stop motion is normally (or was normally) shot with film which runs at a rate of 24 frames per second. To save time and money it is shot on twos. So every frame would be 2 clicks of the camera which equal 12 frames per second. The that is the bare minimum that the perception of motion is achieved. Any lower frame rate and you will be able to see all the individual frames and it will look extremely choppy.

[Zholl]

Dang, I'd almost forgotten about this. Thanks for the suggestions. I've got it rendering right now. Fortunately my camera saves everything as IMG_XXXX.JPG, so I didn't have to do anything there, but, man this is slow. It's successfully locking up my pc too. I can barely type this up. I've got it set somewhere around 20-25 fps, and I'm looking at about 2 minutes long as of right now, and we've still got what, 3 weeks of build season yet? Anyway, I better stop trying to type, before I go nuts...

Oh, btw, can Premier resize all of the images to something more usable? I've been using a Rebel XT DSLR camera to take these, and the pictures are all a lot bigger than my monitor, but resizing 1000+ pictures is a pain.

[Samwise137]

I had problems rendering a similar video with Premier CS4 last week. Sounds like the same issue. My solution was to render short bursts of the video and then cut it back together in another file. Didn't lose as much quality as I expected. On the other hand, I was using one of the crap computers that our school put in the lab. My computer would have been much smoother. I just couldn't get all the files off the network that our students had used in the video. As for globally resizing, I would guess that that's not a job for premier and more a job for something else. I know adobe has a program in the third creative suite that can do it (and it's not photoshop) but I can't remember what it's called.

[BuddyB309]

Originally Posted by Zholl

Oh, btw, can Premier resize all of the images to something more usable? I've been using a Rebel XT DSLR camera to take these, and the pictures are all a lot bigger than my monitor, but resizing 1000+ pictures is a pain.

*flies in* WHOOSH!!!

Why yes kind sir! Premiere can resize your video clips and much more! After you set the frame rate of the image sequence file in your bin by right clicking and going to interpret footage (Attachment 01) you then import it into your timeline. Then highlight the footage in the time line, open the effect controls panel/tab and you can scale your footage there!! (attachment 02) Whoo hoo!! If its lagging for you just smack ENTER on your keyboard and premiere will make a video preview file for you and the bar at the top of the timeline will turn green. If that's not what you want then just render that baby out as a .mov with an animation codec so there is no compression loss and re import it back into premiere.

My work here is done.

*flies off* WHOOSH!! "Llamas away!!"


ok so superheros are on my mind

[Zholl]

Originally Posted by BuddyB309

ok so superheros are on my mind

Lol, yep, they most certainly are

Anyway, thanks for the help. Now that I've got some free time, I guess I should get the whole thing compiled and everything. Been doing just bits and pieces until we were done in the shop