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Import Structure

Lesson 18 from: Capturing Change Timelapse Workshop

Colin Delehanty

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Lesson Info

18. Import Structure

Lesson Info

Import Structure

(gentle music) Okay, let's bring these time lapses to life. Let's start importing all of our time lapses from our memory card. And the first thing you wanna do is open up a template. And if you don't have a template, you can follow the one that I've got here. So I'm gonna go into the Projects folder and I have a template. I use all capitals to indicate that is not an actual folder that I'm hosting files in. It's just all capitals with brackets to indicate that that's the template. And so to go through the different levels of this template. This is just a very simple new project folder. You put your project name right there. In the next tier, you see pre-production, production, and post-production. And I like to keep those in order from start to finish 'cause that's the way that the production's gonna flow. And so in order to keep that order, I put a 01, 02, 03 in front of those names and then separate with an underscore. And there's nothing in pre-production right now 'cause we're go...

nna be focusing on post-production. So next tier, we have three folders. Right now, we're gonna focus on the first one, but I'll go through all three. We have raw assets and that's just all of the media that we've collected for this entire project. It could be your time lapses. So we have a time lapse folder in there. It could be your photos, it could be your videos. And so I just also keep that in order so that you know where that folder is. Every time you look at that folder, it will be in the same place because you're constantly updating that folder with new media. So that just helps you move through the folder structure faster. Projects, that's gonna be where we put all of our project files for the different software that we're gonna be using to compile our time lapses and render our video. And so it's easiest to find your project file if you have a folder for each software. So I'll have maybe after effects here or light room. We'll go through that later on. The next folder after that is gonna be your output folder. And this one will probably remain empty until you finished your time lapse project. And I like to reserve this folder for when I've edited all my time lapses together and that's gonna be where the final video is gonna live that we'll probably post to the internet. So we're gonna go back to raw assets, and we're gonna go into our time lapse folder. And right here, you see raw. And that's just gonna indicate that that's the location for the untouched files. That's where our raw files are gonna live. Inside our raw folder, we have a couple folders that we use for more in-depth organization. And this is totally unnecessary unless you have your project spanning years, or months or days. Having that extra depth will allow you to find one particular time lapse that you're looking for. If you have 10 time lapses, 20 time lapses, that just makes it easier to find things and we'll speed up your editing process. So we're gonna go to this one right here, which is indicated with Ys. The folder is going to be the year that this project has taken place. And if your project takes place over multiple years, then maybe use a year folder. If you wanna specify further, you can add a month, and you can indicate the month by putting 01 January. And that will allow you to organize your time lapses by month. I put a number in front of January just so that the folders all stay organized in sequential order. And then you can do day and location. And that will just allow you to organize your time lapses more specifically to a specific day. Or if you wanna specify a location within that day, you can add underscore location and that will allow you to find different spots that you shot that day if you shot a lot that day. But really, for this project, we're gonna go back to the raw folder and we're just gonna use year, month, day because we're only gonna organize these by day. And inside that, you're gonna have a folder containing your image sequence for each time lapse. And each of those image sequences are gonna live in their own folder so they don't mix with other time lapses. And we're gonna use this naming instruction, which we're gonna go over next when we import. So let's move on to that. Okay, so now that we know how to navigate our template folder, we're gonna go find an image sequence and import it into the correct location within that template folder. So we're gonna move over to a project that I already created. I renamed this from project name to Winter in Yosemite 'cause that's gonna be the name of our project. We had the same three tiers for pre-production, production, post-production and we're gonna find a time lapse that I added into the raw assets folder into the time lapse and the raw folder. And then you'll find that time lapse was taken on November 26th. So I just have a generic name right here. It's called New Time Lapse. And that has a folder. We're gonna move this over. And that has a folder containing all the images for that image sequence in sequential order. It's really important that all the images are in sequential order. If you come in here and you decide that image 26 is no good, then you would delete that. And there's a gap between 25 and 27 where there's no 26. And that will tell... Later on that will cause a problem where the image or the time lapse will only render from one to and it will not know to continue rendering a time lapse through the end of that time lapse. So make sure that you rename these and you have 'em all in sequential order. We're gonna use a name that will be better for specifying the details of this specific time lapse. So we can look over here. If we expand the window, this is a time lapse of Yosemite Falls. And this is a slighter movement that was going from left to right. We know that this was around sunset. And we're going to just take that information that we have about the time lapse and put it into a name so that we can identify it later. So we're gonna open up Automator. And this is a Mac program. But if you have a PC, there's a great program that I've used quite a bit, it's called Flash Rename. And that thing is super quick, really fun to use for this kind of stuff 'cause it's never caused me a problem. So we're gonna come to this folder right here and we're gonna give it a name to identify the time lapse. And so we are gonna use this structure right here. We're gonna type in the date by year first, then month, and then day. And then we're gonna put a space and put the camera name in there. So this is the Canon. I can't spell. 5D Mark III. We're gonna type in the location, Yosemite Falls. Description. So description I usually choose just the time of day or the event that we captured. After that, the lens. 100 to 400 millimeter was the lens we used. If you really want to use more details to describe this shot because maybe you have two shots are exactly the same description and same lens, you can say it was a pan, or you can say it was a tilt. You can say it was a three axis if there was multiple axis of movement at the very end of your shot. And that will just help it stick out more when you're looking at all the time lapses together in one folder. So this is the name convention we're gonna use for what you can see up at the top here. And so we're gonna open up Automator, which, let's see, I have right here. I'm gonna look at what we've got. We have make sequential is what we're gonna use. We wanna make sure that all the images are named in sequential order. We're gonna take this name that we have here, copy it, paste it into the new name section. So we want the whole file name for each image to be renamed to that at the base. And then we wanna separate the name from the image sequence with an underscore right here. And then we want to use five... I'm gonna use five digits long as the value for how long the image sequence value will be. And then we're going to look at right here, make sure that the example looks okay. XXX just indicates the file extension. And then we're gonna highlight every image using Command A. Says we have 337 images we're dragging in. That looks good. We're gonna put that right on top. So this is all the images that we plan on renaming. And then it's saying that it's gonna move these images through this renaming process. And so we'll go through this. It will come out having a different name and you'll see it right here pretty quickly. So we're gonna hit Run and let that go. Down here, we have check marks, green check marks are good. Over here, we can see that the date, camera, the location, the lens, and all the images look like they're in sequential order with five digit long number. And all the file extensions remain the same. So that's all good. So now we're done importing that time lapse. And we're gonna move on to compiling the time lapse in our next step. (gentle music)

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Ratings and Reviews

Ondrej Dvorak
 

I have seen tons of timelapses, but there is no other timelapse film that touches my soul as much as Project Yosemite 1 I never forget the moment when I saw Project Yosemite for the first time! That moment I knew that that’s what I wanna DO! Colin is the reason that I bought my first DSLR! Thank You Alex for getting together with my hero and make this awesome idea happen!

Bryce Lord
 

Clear and concise workshop to understand the process of Time-lapse photography Being new to this aspect of photography, I found this workshop informative and directional. If I were to give a critique, it would be regarding equipment choice for the entry level bridging to pro-level for the introductory student. Otherwise, it lays a nice foundation to build from.

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