Lessons

Lesson Info

Time Lapse Effect

We were talking about some essentials, like panorama stitching hdr in all of that. And there's. Some other essential. Something could be nice to get into. And so let's take a look. One is time lapse. When a zai mentioned that he's a kind of to kind of partnering three day classes. One was the essentials. This is beyond the basics. So I want to show you beyond what we did last time I was here. And let's show you what I captured first off here is that yellowstone national park and that's where there's I think this might be called grand prismatic am there's. All these great colors. All these people walk around, lots of steam coming out. What I did has set up my camera and on a tripod. I just took shots every so often, tio capture people in all sorts of different locations on that boardwalk that's there. And to get that steam in all sorts of different spots, a swell. And I did that thinking that I would like to create a movie out of it. So it just progresses through all those. So let me re...

mind you first off how to create a time lapse in photo shop if you have these individual images, the first thing is, these are all raw files. And so what I would do is I would select all the raw files I just hold shift I got the last one already selected a hold shift and get the first one I'd take command are that's control are to say opening in raw? Or you could go to the file menu where you find the choice of opening camera, and then I'm gonna hit the select all button of the tops of any change I make to one of them will be applied to the others as well makes sense similar to what we do with the panorama to make sure you have a consistent kind of adjustment, and then I could optimize thes, and I'm not going to spend much of any time optimizing them because we've already talked about adjusting your images with camera, and I would just make this look a little better uh, in many different ways here, when I'm gonna hit the done button to sam, done adjusting my pictures and then in order to create a time lapse you need to get these saved out is either a j peg or a tiff. You can't do the time lapse from raw files, so in order to create the j pegs or tiffs, I would go to the tools menu I would choose photo shop in there's, a choice in here called image processor what image processor is designed to do is take multiple images and quickly scaled them down and save them in common file formats like j beggar tiff so when I choose image processor and asked me which settings I'd like to use, what I'm going to do is tell it to save these j pegs usually you can have resized to fit turned on and you could type in the size you want for your video but I'm not going to do that that's what I do for a straightforward timelapse where I don't want it to look as if the camera is moving or zooming if I wanted to look as if the camera's moving or zooming then I don't want to re scale this image down I want to leave it at full size because then we have we can show just a small portion of it at the beginning instead pan across it we have a lot more information to work with, so I'm just going to make sure resized to fit it's turned off then I'd usually hit run up here and that would end up creating a bunch of full sized j pegs I'm not going to make you wait for that because it could take a little bit of time coming from full size images I've already ran it and I have a folder right here called full size j peg which is simply the result of doing that the other thing that I need to do is make sure that the file names that air there are completely sequential if I look at the original files, they have long file names, but I don't know that they're all sequential if I look I think there was some that were missing forty nine forty eight, forty seven but it won't work if there's any a break in the numbering scheme of the files so what they do just to be sure of that once have applied the image processor I take the resulting a folder of images I go to the tools menu and first I need to choose select also type command ada select all, then I can choose batch rename and I'm just gonna rename these where I give it any name I want and I'll tell it to start it's numbering with one so all I have this set up for is some tax that I typed in and then what's called a sequence number and sequence number simply means number these files starting with the number I put in here in incriminating up by one on each so I'll click rename and then it will quickly rename all those files and that's just to be sure that we don't have any breaks in the numbering if I happen to have thrown out one of those files or something and there was a gap, this wouldn't work all right, we got what I want now I'm gonna take those images and I'm going to put him somewhere that's easy to remember. Easy to get to. I'll just moto put him on my desktop because I'm gonna have to navigate him to them from within photo shop. It's just convenient if I have it somewhere convenient. So I got a photo shop now I go to the file menu and I choose open in the open dialog box I navigate to wherever those files happened. B minor in this folder called false s j peg, I click on the very first image that's in that folder in the only other thing you need to do is at the bottom of my screen is a check box the check boxes called image sequence. If I turned that on when the first image in that folder is selected, then it's going to also open all of the other files a swell and turn it into a video all going to do is choose open. It will ask you how many frames per second you'd liketo have. Now let me just briefly go over there and glance we had a total of thirty three frame james thirty frames per second is normal video rate, but that means this video would only be just one point one seconds long. Because thirty three frames at thirty frames per second it's just over a second I'm gonna make this so maybe it's ten frames per second that would make it three seconds long maybe I'll make it eight frames per second in click okay, now I'm gonna have a time lapse already set up and if I want to play it, all I need to do is go to the window menu and there's a choice in here called timeline might not have ever used timeline if you never edit video or anything, you'd have no reason to use it. But if I choose timeline there's a play button in here I'm not sure how good it's gonna do playing this right now because the resolution of this file is much larger than needed it's the full resolution of my camera usually the resolution of video is much lower than that, but I'll hit the play button just make sure it's working now it should actually go faster and smoother than that once I save it out because didn't I type in like eight frames per second or something? All this might be a prince one one no, I think it's about three or four so anyway it's playing it so I do have my time lapse it's just gonna be smoother once I'm done exporting that and getting it into a program designed for playing video what I want to do now is make it so instead of having the camera in the same position the whole time it looks as if I brought more expensive gear with me a lot of people that shoot timelapse bring special gear with them where you have what's called a slide where the camera is actually on a motorized little bar that moves so that it takes one picture than it moves over a little bit takes another picture that it moves over and so on and you have to lug all that stuff with you and I'm too lazy for that I want to cheat, eat and make it look as if I used to slide the other thing that can do is they can adam a motor to your camera lens and it could zoom lens a little bit between each shot so it looks like you're zooming in and zooming out and that gear's even heavier and more expensive to get that we want the same look but we're going to get use photo shop now it's not really the same is bringing that gear in this case it's going to look pretty much the same just because we're so far away from this subject matter that you wouldn't notice the big difference having the gear versus doing in photo shop but if on the other hand we have a scene with objects really close to the camera, you'd notice a huge difference because that it would be let's say there's a tree close to you and there's something else in the distance you would notice a parallax difference where the tree moves different amount in the background as you scan across it or if you're zooming you look like the camera's passing by the tree and we're not going to quite get that but let's take a look so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna first turn this into a smart object so go up to the I usually go to the filter menu to do that there's a choice called convert for smart filters so I turned into a smart object in that is going to allow me to scale this layer and where it contract the scaling that happens the second thing I'm going to do is I'm going to crop this image so that the amount of information we use is the same a lot of information that's used in hd video look if you have an hd tv at home you know the thin screen big tv the resolution of one of those this standard resolution is nineteen twenty by ten eighty that's hd you've heard of ten eighty pee before well, that means how many pixels aaron the height tenney so the way I'm going to do that is I'm going to choose the marquis tool this tool right here and in the options bar across the top of my screen there a choice called style and I'll tell it I want to fix size selection and here I can type it in I'm going to type in nineteen twenty and in the other field ten groups ten, eighty that's the size of hd video so that should work out then I'm just going to click on my image in this represents how much we're going to see when we start our video and what I'm going to do is come in here and decide what part of this scene would I like to show you when we start up the video I'm gonna show over here where you can't really see that prismatic pool that's there instead we just see some steam and the people then I'm going to go to this and I'm going to crop the image I'll just go up to the image menu was a choice called crop that is going to hide all the information that's outside of that rectangle so all we have is that little piece I'll get rid of my selection by going to the selectmen you choosing d select and here's what we're going to have it the beginning our video I consume up and now let's do it where we have our video and instead of just showing this part we're gonna have it look as if we're zooming our lens and we might even be moving the camera at the same time so here's, what we're gonna do, I'm gonna take this little thing at the bottom. If you look where the time line is, I'm gonna take this and I'm going to drag it all the way over there, or you could just tap a nikon this icon right here that I can just means go to first frame or beginning of video tap it. So all that did was it moved this little bar to the beginning. That bar is what you might call the play head it's where we're working right now, so it means whatever we're doing right now is going to happen at the beginning of the video, then I can come down here. And this is the name of our video clinton's just called video group one and there's a little triangle next to it. If I tap the triangle, we can change the settings there used here, and if I expand this up a little bit, these are the things that we could track across time. I'm gonna click on this that's supposed to look like little stopwatch and click on it, and that means we're going to track transformations we make in this layer. The transformation is what photoshopped calls scaling and rotating and even moving. Something and when I turned that on here I'll turn it back off again just by clicking again watch what happened over the time line right about here when I turned on that little thing do you see a little diamond appear that diamond means it just recorded the current settings for scaling in position then I'm gonna take this little bar that's here and I'm going to drag it to the end of my video to the end of my video then if I also want to track what's going on there all I need to do is make a change to my image so I'm gonna go over here and choose edit free transform three transforms what usually used to scale a ratchet things and I'm going to grab these little handles which represents how far out the picture goes and by the way I did something special so I could see those handles because they were beyond the edge of my screen when I first chose free transform to make it so you can see them you can type command zero command zero means fit in window and when you happen to be transforming things it means fit your transformation handles within this window that's commands there o on a mac control zero in windows I'm gonna then grab one of these corners and pole just so you know I'm holding down the shift key because if I don't have shift held down I can easily distort this like squish it in one direction I can click near the middle and move it a swell oh, I'm just trying to get this so it in general fills the screen like that when I'm done I'll hit enter so now if you look at my timeline, you'll find another little diamond right there, which means it notice to change that I made to whatever it was I was tracking what am I tracking transforming the layer so it's remembering what I used the beginning of the video and what I used in the end so I'm going to zoom back up on my image this command plus would zoom out port if you'd like and let's see if it's working all I'm going to do is drag this little play head across and see if it looks different as we get across here look like we're zooming up all right, but it's not going to be smooth? Well, I'm doing it here in photo shop because this file is huge it's twenty four mega pixels, which is the full resolution of my camera in to try to play a video of that size photo shops just not up to it, so what we need to do is once we've gotten this all set up, I'm gonna go to the file menu, I'm gonna choose export and I'm going to say render video and that means make a file that's optimized for video that we can play in any program designed for doing video and in here I can give it a name at the top I can tell it where to save it all right now it's set to my desktop and if I know if a file for him and I'd like to use, I can specify it, but h two sixty four should be fine that's what like apple uses for a lot of things and if I needed to speed up or slow it down, remember we had eight frames per second. I could adjust it if I wanted to, but all I'm going to do here is click render and now it's going to make the individual frames that are scaled to various sizes and it's going to optimize sit for normal plane of the video. Once it's done, I should be able to play this in any program designed for playing video s o I could open it up in apple's preview application or even on the mac. If you have a file on you want a preview? What it looks like you can just click on it from within the operating system and hit the space bar space bar will open up a preview and show you whatever picture you have selected or in the case of a video will start playing the video if you're not used to that, well, this is rendering aiken go. Show it to you let's. See here o j peg files in this folder. If I click on one not double click, just click wants to get selected. I'll hit space bar. You see how it shows me a preview? If I use the arrow keys, I could cycle through to the other images. But you can do that also with the time lapse. So it looks like it's done because there's no more progress bar going on here so I will hide. So hide others, which means hide, photo, shop and let's go find it. I'm assuming it actually saved it inside this folder because I see it right there made today. Yeah, right about this time. So now I'm going to the space bar let's preview what we have now if I knew I was going to shoot time lapse to really use in a project, I probably would've captured more frames in that because I was actually capturing these friends for a different purpose that happened to be on a tripod that I thought would be useful for time lapse. But if I really knew it was gonna be a time lapse having a total of thirty three frames. Not really that many. Instead, I might have wanted to capture about ten times that many. And then I can have a nice, really smooth video here that that seems out. But if I show you one more time, you see the zoo mean, and it could also feel like camera movement if you happen to move it around, too. So, like, when we were done, we could have zoomed it so far that you could no longer see the people of over here, and then it would feel more like the camera moved as its own. So that is how you can create a time lapse that is not just a static one, and I find that a lot of people have captured a huge number of time lapses, but they never bought a special gear tohave slider, and to be able to zoom their lens and all that. And so, if you compare your time lapse to what you might see when you search on youtube for time lapse is you're like, oh, my mine are so much more boring than that, because the camera's always steady well, if you capture them at the full resolution of your camera, you have more information than you need in that video, so you can get away with doing the effect that I just showed you and the quality is still there because we have so much more info than we need. We can crop it just down to that small area and then do our transformation. All right. So when I'm done and I've actually rendered off that video, I don't need this file anymore. And I don't even say that unless I plan on coming in here again and modifying the transformation or something. So I'm not going to save it.