Timelapse Tutorial!

Posted by Tiff in Photography | 1 comment

I’ve been making lots of timelapse videos lately, and they are so delightful to me I wish I could invite them over to dinner and feed them yummy food capped off with a great dessert and a little kiss on the cheek. That’s what I want to do with anything and anyone I find as fantastic and fun as these timelapses!

Making them is so easy! And here’s what I love about them. Since I take a billion pictures with my digital SLR (Canon Rebel at the moment), I have a billion(-2) pictures that end up going to waste. Either they’re out of focus, or not quite right, or not really interesting. Since I’ve only been shooting with it for a short time (2 years, but it’s really only been a year since I figured out how it was different from my point and shoot…) I’m still learning, and the best way to learn is to shoot like my life will end unless I manage to click the camera shutter once every 35 seconds. That’s probably really annoying to the people around me, now that I think about it. But seriously, I take pictures like the camera is surgically attached to one eye and my hand.

You may find the same with your picture taking exploits. I always felt so bad erasing the bad eggs even though I’d never make prints or hang them on my wall.

And then, one day I was scrolling through a batch in Lightroom
and realized that if you look at them fast enough, together they tell a story of the day that you can’t get with just one picture. And it made me feel happy that I could use all the pictures for one project and not feel guilty for getting rid of the practically useless ones afterwards.

The timelapses that I end up with are pretty unruly and out of control…kind of like us, so I don’t mind. Because I don’t use a tripod to keep the camera steady, the videos end up with a ‘jumpy’ look to them. This is also kind of like us, so I don’t mind that either. This is a tutorial for a starter level timelapse…something to do with all your pictures that makes a fun snippet of your day.

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You need:

A camera
A large memory card to hold all the countless pictures you take.
Something to take pictures of (preferably a fun outing somewhere with people you enjoy!)
A sense of flair. You can purposely go out of focus for a few shots, zoom in and out, and kind of go crazy with it!
A Mac computer (seriously. Why use anything but an Apple?! For all you non apple peeps out there…I’m sorry. You’re SOL.***not really, I found a tutorial for you, I’ll link to it at the bottom!)
iphoto
imovie
Lightroom
or Elements
. This isn’t necessary, but I do like to adjust my pictures in lightroom before uploading them to imovie, and iphoto doesn’t cut the mustard.
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*Now go out and take pictures! To get the full effect, make sure to keep them all horizontal, it doesn’t look good to switch between vertical and horizontal when it’s going by so fast in the timelapse.

*Once you take them, upload them to Lightroom or Elements and fiddle around with the editing to get them just the right tone/color/contrast.

If you don’t want to do this, then skip right to…

*upload the pics to iphoto. This step ensures that imovie can quickly and easily snatch them up. In fact…

*upload the pics to imovie!

*imovie is linked directly to itunes and iphoto (see why Apple rocks?!) so the next steps are just once click adjustments. Click the iphoto folder your pictures are in and drag it to the space in imovie for pics. imovie annoyingly wants to give the pictures a ‘ken burns’ effect of panning on each pic, so stop it by highlighting all the pictures you have, clicking on the first picture, then clicking on the little wheel that comes up and go to ‘cropping, ken burns, & rotation’. Then click ‘fit’ over on the picture.

*now adjust the speed that each picture is shown. Movies are at a frame rate of 24 pictures every second, but that’s way to fast and jumpy for these handheld timelapses, so I make each picture show for .25 of a second. Knowing that, you can figure out how long your final timelapse will be by doing a little math. 4 pictures equals one second for me. I adjust the speed by clicking that same little wheel and then clicking on clip adjustments, and then I change the duration and make sure to apply it to all stills.

*now add music. Because imovie is hooked up to itunes, you can just click on the little music symbol tab and up pops all your sweet sweet tunes. drag the song that you want over and drop it on your photos. The green music bar also has a little wheel, so when you click on the wheel you can trim the music clip, adjust it, and adjust the audio.

*there’s also a button over by the photo and music tabs that let’s you add in text and special effects like fading in and out. Go ahead and play around with it!

I put together a couple new timelapse videos just for this post. The first one is a timelapse of an overlook off of Mulholland Drive. Frankly, I’m a little embarrassed by it…everything went wrong and the beautiful timelapse I envisioned in my head just never happened. I went to take sunset pictures, but missed the sunset due to wrestling kids who it was like trying to herd cats to get into the car.

I forgot my tripod.

I don’t have a speedlite, and it was getting dark quickly.

None of my kids was interesting in standing still for a gorgeous headshot with the LA skyline behind them.

The night was an epic photographic fail.

But, even an epic photographic fail can lead to a quirky timelapse, so I’m not sweating it. Actually, I am sweating it, and I will be until I go back up to the outlook with a tripod and at the right time with 3 kids I’ve rented who will sit and smile nicely and generally cooperate with my plans!

My second photographic fail turned timelapseis only 45 pictures long, due to a dead battery without a back up. Ah, fate, you deal me such hammer blows sometimes!!!

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Let me know if this has helped guide and inspire to make your own timelapses. Just start where you are, dig into your backlog and pick a segment of time that you shot pictures from…a day at the park, a walk in the woods, anything. Then BAM! use that Mac to it’s full purpose! Then show me what you’ve got!
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*while at the Mulholland Drive overlook, I met a dude who was there at the right time, with tripods and his Canon 5D Mark II. Turns out he does timelapses, too. But really, really nice ones. Not jumpy and spastic and out of control at all! You can check out some really amazing work over on his vimeo page.

*To see some other amazing timelapses that will make you cry from their beauty, check out Tom Lowe’s vimeo page. I’ve never met him, but follow him on flickr and am always blown away by what he captures through his lens!

***non Apple peeps..first…why?! Second, link through for a timelapse tutorial for you. Link through here for a free MovieMaker software to help edit your still pictures into a timelapse video! Yay!