How to Shoot a Dynamic Timelapse and Hyperlapse

1. Introduction: Hi, welcome to my how to shoot Dynamic time-lapses course. My name is Chris, and I'm a full-time filmmaker and photographer. Throughout this course, I'm going to be showing you how to plan to shoot and edit amazing time-lapses, and how you can add movement into your time-lapses to turn your time-lapses into hyper lapses. Grab your camera and let's begin shooting some awesome time-lapses. 2. What is a Timelapse?: Before we jump into how to create a timelapse, we first just need to pull it back a little bit and just ask the question, what is a timelapse, and what is the purpose of a timelapse? Well, simply put a time-lapse is showing a passing of time. A timelapse is captured over an extended period of time. Now, this could be 10 minutes, half an hour, one hour, 10 hours, multiple months, and then essentially, this is sped up and turn into a five-second video, a 10-second video, a 20-second video. Essentially, a timelapse is showing the passing of time. Now because a timelapse is showing an extended period of time, you need to approach time-lapses different to normal video. Because yes, you could just put your video camera on a tripod and leave it filming for two hours, but the problem is you'll have really large file sizes and it won't really look as dynamic as it could look. This is why we actually need to get a still photography camera to shoot a video timelapse. In order to capture the timelapse, so we actually need to take still images rather than video footage, and generally, when you're filming video an average frame rate is 25 frames per second, or 25 still images to make up one second of video. This is what you have to have in the back of your mind every time you're capturing a timelapse. If you're shooting a video which is 25 frames per second, you need to take 25 still images for one second of video. That means if you're shooting a four-second timelapse you need 100 still images, and these still images can be taken two seconds apart, 10 seconds apart, a minute apart, that bit is completely up to you, but in order to capture a timelapse, you need to shoot at least 25 still images for one second of video. A timelapse is a video that is created out of still images and the purpose of it is to show the passing of time. Now you can get really dynamic fancy time lapses, or you can get really bog-standard time-lapses. I won't get into the detail right now, that's it for this episode, and in the next episode, I'm going to talk about prepping the camera and what you need to know to capture a great timelapse. 3. Preparation: Now, we actually know what a time-lapse is. Now we need to prepare our camera and get it ready to shoot a great time-lapse. Throughout this episode, I'm going to be talking about some of the things you need to look out for in your camera so that you can get a really clean, dynamic time-lapse. First of all, you want to shoot on a digital SLR camera or a mirrorless camera, you want to be shooting on a photography camera, not a video camera. Now you can shoot great time-lapses on your phone or on other cameras. But in this course, we are going to be focusing on photography cameras because we're going to be able to get the most out of the sensor and we're going to get really interesting result if we have a photography stills camera. So first step is to grab your digital SLR or your mirrorless camera. We have to change this into manual mode. Now, if you don't know what manual mode is, it's essentially just you taking control over the camera settings. So rather than putting it in a portrait mode or a sports mode, we are putting this into manual mode, and this means we can control the white balance, the aperture, the shutter speed. All of these other settings that would change if we were shooting in an automatic mode. The reason why we want full control over the settings, is because we want the setting to be the same on every photo in the time-lapse. The problem is if you were to shoot a time-lapse in an automatic photo mode then the settings would always change as the circumstances and the environment was changing and the time-lapse would constantly flicking, the light would be changing, the movement would be changing, and it wouldn't look very professional. It's really important that we switch to manual mode and dial in all of our settings. There's a few settings that we really want to pay close attention to, and that is the white balance. The white balance is essentially just the color of the light. So if you're capturing your time-lapse in the middle of the day outside, then you want this to be 5500 Kelvins or daylight. If you are capturing this at night-time, you would want this to be 4300, 3200, or a general night mode setting in your camera. Next up we want to focus on shutter speed because your shutter speed can change the look of your time-lapse. Now we'll get more into this in a future episode. But generally, if you have a slower shutter, you'll get more motion blur. But if you have a quicker shutter, then you'll have less motion blur. So feel free to pick a number that works for you and stick with that throughout the time-lapse. Then, we want to adjust the aperture. The aperture is controlling the amount that is in focus. If you have a lower aperture of around F1.8, then only a small part of the frame will be in focus. The background will be in focus, but the foreground will be blurry. Then the opposite way, if you go up to around F22, everything will be in focus. So feel free to pick an aperture that works for you and your environment. Then you want to go through the rest of your camera and make sure that none of your settings are in an automatic mode. Make sure you've got full manual control over every setting. Now, once you've done that, we can move on to the next thing to look out for, and that is JPEG versus RAW. JPEG and RAW are two different file formats that your camera can take photos in. JPEG is a very compressed file format, whereas RAW is a very large file format that captures all of the available data. Essentially, JPEG has a smaller file size, but the problem with JPEG is it crushes some of the highlights and some of the shadows. If you overexpose a little bit with a JPEG image, then unfortunately, you won't be able to bring that back in the edit. Whereas when you're shooting in RAW, you have the flexibility in the edit to change some of the settings and bring back any parts of the image that might be overexposed or underexposed. Essentially RAW gives you more flexibility. But RAW file sizes are 3, 4 or even 5 times larger than JPEG. If you've only got a small SD card of around 16 gigabyte, for example, then probably shoot in JPEG. But if you've got enough space on your card, I would always recommend shooting in RAW because it gives you more flexibility when you're editing your time-lapse later on. Essentially, RAW will give you better dynamic range and better flexibility, but JPEG gives you the luxury of having smaller file sizes. If you want your time-lapse to look better, I would lean into RAW. Then next up you want to make sure that your camera is set to single shooting mode rather than high shutter mode or multiple shooting modes. The reason why we want to stick to a single shooting mode is because when we're shooting with a time-lapse remote later on, unfortunately, if you're set to a multiple shooting mode, it may trigger more photos than you actually need. If you set this to single shooting, that it means you're only going to capture the stills that you need. You see all of this being demonstrated on screen. This is being demonstrated with a Canon 5D Mark 3. Now, you may have a different camera to this, which means these options may be slightly different. They might be laid out slight differently, but they all do exactly the same thing. Each and every camera uses the same terminology. Shutter speed, aperture, white balance, RAW, JPEG, shooting modes. They're all going to use the same terminology. It might just be hidden in a different menu or in a slightly different layout. Once you've adjusted everything in camera to those settings, we can now actually go through the process of capturing our time-lapse. 4. How to Shoot a Timelapse: When it comes to shooting your time-lapse, there are a few different things that you need to look out for. The first one is, is there any movements in the frame? Because if not, then there's no point of having the time lapse because we're not going to see that progression of movement throughout the time-lapse. That could be the clouds in the sky, it could be caused policy on a busy road, it could be people in a town center. You want something that is constantly moving in the frame. Because the problem is if you're capturing an empty high street on a very clear day, then there's going to be no difference between the first photo and the last photo. It would just look like a long video. The first thing you want to look out for is movements. What is moving in the frame? Once you've found the perfect location, it's really important that you mount your camera onto a tripod. Because if you don't mount your camera onto a tripod and you shoot this handheld, then every image is going to be framed slightly different and this means you're going to have to stabilize this in the edit. Or if you don't have the facilities to do that, you going to have a very shaky time lapse. So make sure you mount your camera to a tripod. Then with all of the settings down and that we talked about on the previous episode, you then want to go ahead and attach a time-lapse remote. Now, you don't have to have a time-lapse remote. This is just an added extra to make life easy for you. If you don't have a time-lapse remote, then you're going to have to press the button at every single increment. If you're taking pictures every five seconds, you'll have to put the stopwatch on your phone, and every five seconds take the picture. But if you've got a time-lapse remote, all you have to do is plug the remote into the camera. You can set the interval on the time-lapse remote, and then every time that time comes back around, it will take the picture for you. This means once you've framed up the shots, you've got everything dialed in, and this time that remote is running, you can just go and sit down. You can be on your phone, you can do what you need to do and then come back to that once it's captured all of the images it needs to capture. A time-lapse remote is not an essential, you can do it without. But I really would recommend having a time-lapse because it makes life really easy and you don't have to worry about missing a single frame. Because if you're shooting a time-lapse for an extended period of time, maybe over one hour or over two hours, if you are having to count every five seconds, every 10 seconds, and then take a picture, you might end up missing one or two and you might notice this in the time-lapse. For example, if you forget to take pictures for 30 seconds, maybe you get distracted, then it means there'll be a sudden jump in the time-lapse because you're missing the images that would've made up that little gap. They'll just be this really short dramatic jump in the time-lapse and that does not look professional, that looks quite amateur. Having a time-lapse remote ensures that you're not going to miss any images and it means if you do get distracted, it doesn't matter. Then of course, in the previous episode, we did talk about camera settings, but didn't mention you want to have manual focus. Make sure your lens is not set to autofocus. Make sure it is set to manual focus. Because the problem is if your camera automatically changes focus and you don't realize, then it might suddenly go blurry in a few frames, or maybe it goes blurry for the rest of the time-lapse and you haven't realized. Make sure it is set to manual focus and set the focus before you start shooting the time-lapse. With all your camera settings set to manual mode, your time-lapse remote is plugged into the camera. The camera is sitting on the tripod. You've got the perfect image framed up and there's lots of movement within the frame. You can now just press ''Go'' on a time-lapse remote and you can just sit back and wait for five minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes, half an hour. Wait however long you need to wait for the time-lapse. Then you have a really awesome time-lapse sequence captured in camera. Now there's no specific time that you should roll the time-lapse for, but generally, time-lapses work by compressing time. So you're showing the time pulsing. If you're only time lapsing for three minutes, not a lot will really change in that time, so the time must not to be very dramatic. But if you leave your time-lapse rolling for 20 minutes at a minimum, I gently say try not to shoot less than 20, so try and aim for at least 20 minutes, then you'll get a good varied amounts of movement within that frame. 5. Using Long Exposure with Timelapses: One of the major benefits to using a still photography camera rather than a video camera to capture your time-lapse, is you can take full advantage of the lower shutter speeds. If that doesn't mean anything to you, then it's those time-lapses sees that have this really nice long light streak. You typically see this in time lapses captured in the evening. You will see the tail lights on a car stretched out along the road. This is because they've taken advantage of a lower or a slower shutter speed. That means they've kept the shutter open for extended periods of times to get this really cool motion blur. That's why I love to use still photography for time lapses rather than videos. Now the question is, how do we achieve that effect? Essentially, all you need to do is just pull your shutter speed down. Rather than having a shutter speed of one over 100, one over 200, one over 50, you want to pull this down to one over three, or maybe just 1 second, 2 seconds, 10 seconds, 20 seconds. The longer you open the shutter for, the more light you're going to let into the camera sensor, and the more motion blur you'll get in the frame. The problem is though, the longer the shutter is open for, the more light comes into the camera sensor, which is completely fine if you're creating a time-lapse at nights because the more you increase the shutter, the cleaner the image is going to be. But if you wanted this really cool a longer exposure motion blur effects in the daytime, if you tried to pull your shutter down to 20 seconds or 30 seconds, then your image is just going to completely overexpose. That's where we need to use a neutral density filter to help to stop down that light. A neutral density filter, or an ND filter for short, is essentially just a pair of sunglasses for your lens. This is an ND filter, and this ND filter is rated at ND 1000. When it comes to ND filters, the higher the number, the more intense the effect is. Essentially, all this is doing is just stopping the light coming into the lens. If you have an ND filter of ND 10, then it will let a decent amount of light into the lens. However, ND 1,000 shuts off a lot of light. If I was to put this over this lens, you see it really blocks off a lot of the light coming into the camera sensor. If you were capturing a long exposure time lapse in the middle of the day, for example, then using an ND filter on the front of the lens is going to help you to open up your shutter, get those slower shutters and that means you can get that motion blur without overexposing. The problem is though, when you open up your shutter speed, you are going to more motion blur. Which means it's really important that your camera is on a tripod. It's also really important that the ground isn't shaking or moving. This means if you're capturing a time-lapse on a bridge, make sure the wind isn't swaying the bridge, because unfortunately you will see that movement in the photo if you've got a longer shutter speed. Make sure the camera is mounted onto the tripod and make sure the tripod is nice and secure and the ground isn't moving or you're not swaying around. It's also crucially important as well that you do use a time lapse remote when you're using slower shutter speeds, because the physical action of pressing the button on the camera could be enough vibration to go into the shot. Just pressing that button could cause a little bit of a dip in the camera and you will see that movement baked into the photo. If you want to have the extended motion blur effect in your photos and in your time-lapse, then it's really important that you use an ND filter. It's important that you use a tripod, and it's also important that you use a time-lapse remote to get your hands off the camera. Regardless of whether you are trying to shoot a night time long exposure photo or a daytime long exposure photo, the rules are basically the same. You might not have to use an ND filter in the evening. However, if you're in the middle of a bright city center, then you may have to use an ND filter, just a less intense one, so maybe ND4, 6 or 8. 6. Adding Movement to your Timelapse: In this lesson, we're taking our camera off the tripod and we're placing it onto a gimbal so that we can shoot some really awesome moving time-lapses. In this example, I have used the Zhiyun crane 3 S2 capture. There's really awesome, a moving timelapse. Of course, you also have other examples and most gimbals are capable of having a time-lapse feature, this right here is the Manfrotto MPEG220. This right here is the DJI gimbal for your phone. Of course, pretty much every other gimbal on the market should have some timelapse feature. But the way that this feature work is you set an in point, you set an out point, you set the duration, so how long you want the timelapse to run for, and then it will complete that movement in the time selected. All you have to do then is just take the pictures and you'll get this really awesome dynamic moving timelapse. If I was to set my first points over here, so it's angled up and over to the right and then I set my second point over here so it tilts down and pans to the left. Then if I set the duration to 20 minutes, for example, it means it will take 20 minutes to go from this first point to the second point. Now, most of these gimbals have a feature where you can connect your camera to the gimbal and it actually takes the photos for you without actually needing a timelapse remote. But the problem is some older cameras don't connect to the new gimbal, so it's always worth having your timelapse remote in hand, just in case this doesn't work. The Canon 5D Mark III sometimes doesn't connect with some gimbal so I find I have to use the timelapse remote. So I just put the timelapse remote on, up add this to the top of the camera, and then I just let that take the pictures while the gimbal is completing the movement. Now you can achieve some really awesome and really dynamic time-lapses by using a gimbal for your timelapse. However, because your camera is now mounted onto a gimbal rather than a tripod, sometimes a little bit of wind can actually affect the movement of the gimbal and can add a little bit of movement into your timelapse. So it's worth looking out for that if you can't try and block off any winds that might potentially move the gimbal or affect the images that you're taking. It's also worth noting as well that if you're going for a really long shutter speed of 20 or 30 seconds, for example, you're really trying to get that long exposure effect then if you're gimbal is moving continuously, then you might see that movement actually baked into the motion blur of your frame. If you're capturing a timelapse of the car is going from left to right, but your gimbal is going up and down, then you'll get that motion blur bleeding up into the frame. Generally, when I'm shooting a time-lapse on the gimbal, I like to have a higher shutter speed one way there's not too much motion blur and I always try and keep my bag next to the gimbal so that any wind isn't going to knock the camera and have shaky results. Sometimes though, you can't help it. There will be a little bit of shake and that's where we can fix that in the edit. But putting your camera onto a gimbal and following the timelapse settings on that specific gimbal, can create a really awesome and dynamic result. Of course, as well you can take this one step further and add even more movement by using motorized sliders. Eight slider is essentially just a small train track for your camera, and this allows your camera to travel left and rights. If you get a motion-controlled device like a Syrp Genie, it means you can actually program the camera to go from left to right or right to left until it's up and down within a set amount of time. That means you can get really awesome dynamic traveling time-lapses. Having your camera on a gimbal is really good because you can tilt it and pan, but the problem is you're locked into one specific physical location. So if you use a motorized slider, for example, you can actually physically move the camera while panning and tilting, so you can get really dynamic time-lapses. The problem is we're doing all of this though, is it can get a little bit expensive. This gimbal, for example, was around 600 pounds when I purchased it. This gimbal over here is around 200, and the smaller phone gimbal is around the 100-pound mark. But the motorized slider can cost around 500-1000 pounds. If you're just trying to add a little bit more of excitement into your time-lapses then using the motorized option might not be the way to go and instead, you might want to look at doing hyperlapses. 7. What is a Hyperlapse?: A hyperlapse is another variation of a moving timelapse. However, unlike the motorized timelapses and the gimbal timelapses, hyperlapses actually have a lot of movement. With a hyperlapse you you actually travel 10, 20, 30 meters, or you could even travel further than that. When done correctly a hyperlapse can look extremely dynamic and can look really amazing. However, they do require a lot more work versus your traditional timelapse or motorized timelapse. There's two different ways that you can capture a hyperlapse. The first option is by hand, or the second option is with a gimbal. I'm going to run you through how to set up both of these, to begin with, and then I'll talk about the differences afterwards. You need to follow the same advice as a timelapse except for the tripod rule. You need to make sure you're in manual mode. You need to make sure that you've got a timelapse remote taking the pictures at the perfect time. Then you need to follow all of the other advice that I've mentioned in this. However, that is where the difference ends. A hyperlapse requires a lot more work than a timelapse does. With a timelapse, you put the camera on a tripod and you let it do its thing for half an hour. With a motorized timelapse you put the camera on a gimbal or a slider and you let it do its thing for a while. But with a hyperlapse, you're the one that's doing the work. First of all, you have to find an object or a landmark that you're going to orbit around or you're going to head towards or away from. If you were doing a hyperlapse around a landmark for example, then you want to choose a very specific point on that landmark, and that is what you want to frame up on every single shot. If we're shooting a hyperlapse of the London Eye for example, use the center of the London Eye as the framing for the center of the shots on every single photo. If we're going from left to right, every photo will be framed up with that in the center. With a hyperlapse essentially you would have the timelapse remote taking your photos at a regular interval, let's say every ten seconds. You frame up that center as the London Eye, it takes the photo. Then you're going to take a step to the right or a step to the left, then you frame it up again, and it takes the picture. Then you take another step, frame it up, take the picture. Then you keep repeating that process until you've got all of the images that you need to create that hyperlapse. Again, you need 25 still images for one second of video. That is, if you are in the PAL region, by the way. If you're in the American NTSC region for example, then you could either go for 24 or 30 still images for one second of video. I'm from England, so my default frame rate is 25 frames per second. But if you're from America, for example, then it could be 24 or 30. You need your timelapse to match. Your timelapse should be 24 or 30 for one second of video. Once you've gone through the process of walking, taking your pictures after each step, then essentially you've now got your hyperlapse. That is the option of doing it by hand. You could frame up the image holding the camera, then you can move on, do this again and keep repeating this process. However, you could also use a gimbal. Make sure the frame is framed up perfectly, and then just complete this action holding onto the gimbal, making sure it's framed up consistently, then you're timelapse remote will take the pictures for you. However, if you wanted to do long exposure hyperlapses, so you wanted that nice motion blur in the frame, but you wanted a hyperlapse, you would need to do the first option on a tripod. You mount your camera onto your tripod, you frame up the first image, you start taking the pictures with the remote. That long exposure photo will take a few seconds to create. Then once that's been taken, you move the entire camera and tripod over, re-frame up, and take the picture. You keep repeating this process over and over again. A hyperlapse can orbit around an object so you can circle around a specific object, or you could aim towards a specific point or come away from specific point. It doesn't matter which option you go for, both can look really dynamic. Hyperlapses are incredible and they really help to take your standard time ups to the next level, but they do require a lot more work and a lot more effort. It's also worth noting as well that your hyperlapse is going to need to be stabilized in the edit. This means you need to have access to a program that allows you to stabilize your footage. You also have to be aware that anything in the foreground is going to mess with the stabilization. If you're orbiting around an object, for example, and something passes the foreground of the shot, that object in the foreground could actually mess with the stabilization process. It's really important that nothing is interacting with the hyperlapse, nothing is getting in the way. Because if anything blocks the shot or takes up a large amount of foreground space, then it could actually affect the hyperlapse. Regardless of which option you go for, whether you go by hand and take all your pictures this way, or you put your camera onto a gimbal, or you put your camera onto a tripod for those long exposure hyperlapses, whichever option you go for, make sure you get all of the photos and you're in manual mode with all of these photos. Once you've got all of those photos, we can get those onto the computer and start editing our timelapses and our hyperlapses. 8. Editing in Adobe Lightroom Classic: If you decided to take full advantage of your camera sensor and shoot your time-lapse in raw image files, then you'll want to run these through Adobe Lightroom. This is because you can get all of the color information back and you can really manipulate those images to get a beautiful looking time-lapse. Now, if you decided not to use raw and capture your time-lapse using JPEG images instead, then you don't have to do this section, you can just color your time-lapse in Premiere or another editing software. However, you can actually, do this process because the grading tools inside of Lightroom are really intuitive and you can get really precise. So you don't have to do this step if you captured in JPEG, but I would recommend watching this episode so that you can figure out the pros and cons of running your images through a Lightroom before Premiere. Once you're inside of Adobe Lightroom, you first just want to begin by going down to import so we'll press "Import" and that will load up this window here so you can just scroll through to your image files. Once you've found them, just make sure all of these are selected so they should all have a tick in the top-left corner and once they do, you can just press "Import." That would just take a moment for Lightroom to import all of your images. From here, you can see these first few look very different to the rest of them, and it is because these are test shots. First up, I'm just going to delete these first four images, and then you can just scroll through and make sure all of your files are here. You can see these last ones were separate as well, so we'll delete those. You've got 92 images that we need to edit. I'm just going to go into this first one so I'll double-click this first clip, then we'll go across to "Develop". As you can see, at the moment, it's not exactly looking very dynamic. We need to take full advantage of the CO_2 or the raw capabilities of this image. First of all, you can go over to the left to find all of these presets. You can go for some cinematics, some futuristics, some travel presets. It's up to you, but feel free to scroll through these and find a preset that works for you. You don't have to use a preset though, you can just go straight in over on the right and go into the settings here. On the right, you can see you've got basic tone curve, HSL and color, color grading, detail, lens corrections, transform, effects, and calibration. Let's go through those one by one. First up you've got basic. This here, we can control the color temperature or the white balance, so we'll shift this a bit warmer. Then you've got the tnt, so you can shift this towards green or purple. Then we've got exposure, this is your brightness control. We've got contrast, which is going to add contrast or remove contrast. Then we've got our highlight, which is our brighter parts of our image, so I'm just going to pull those down so that we can really take advantage of that raw file. Then we've got our shadows and generally, I pick these up a little bit, then you've got your whites, so this is your clouds, for example, in this image, and your black so that will be the darker parts of the frame. Then you've got vibrance and saturation, and these are just going to help the colors to pop. Then moving on, you've got the tone curve. If you've worked with curves in Premiere or After Effects then this will feel very intuitive. But essentially, you can separate all of your colors. You can go into the RGB, which is all of the colors combined. We can go into red, green, or blue. Essentially the top-right is the highlights, the bottom left is the shadows and the middle is the midtones, and if you pull the top right over to the left, it's going to increase the brightness of the highlights. But if you pull that down, it would decrease the brightness of the highlights. The same thing with the shadows, you can pull your shadows towards dark or light, and then you can go through each individual color channel and you can push the reds, the greens, and the blues wherever you want them to go. I'm just going to reset all of that though because I did not do a good job of that. But that is the tone curve. Then you've got HSL and color. If we HSL first, you can see, let's target the sky so we'll go down to blur. You can see we can shift the color of the sky towards different shades of blue, purple, and aqua. You can see at the moment it's blue, but if I shift that to the right, then it turns purple. Let's focus on a different color. Let's go towards these red lines. We'll go to read, we'll shift that towards orange. You can see that's not changing a massive amount, so it must be magenta. Let's go down to there, and they go, those lines are turning pink or more red. However, though, you could also go into saturation and you can do the same thing again so we can decrease the saturation or we can increase saturation on individual channels and the same for the luminance, which is just the brightness, essentially, of that color. Then you've got color. This is where you can get really specific and change these colors. Let's jump into the sky again, so let's go for that blue. You can see we can increase the saturation, we can change the hue, we can change the luminance and we can see all of those in this one tab. If you only want it to affect one color, then I would recommend coming over to color rather than HSL. Then we've got color grading and you'll see you've got your shadows, mid tones, and highlights. If you've done any color correction or grading in the past, then this will feel very familiar, but essentially, you can shift your shadows towards a color, you can shift your mid-tones towards different colors, you can even shift your highlights towards different colors as well. You can get some really awesome results here, but this might take you a while so wrap your head around using these shadows, mid tones, and highlights wheels. Then you've got detail and your detail is, essentially, your sharpening. You can add some sharpening here, and if I zoom all the way and you'll really see this in effect. That is at zero, that is at 100. You can see it's adding that digital sharpness which can help if it's a little bit blurry, but too much sharpening can make it look a bit digital, a bit video, it doesn't seem professional. Then you can increase and decrease the radius of the sharpening and you can add some detail, and you can mask, and then you've got some noise reduction as well so if you've got a really grainy, noisy image, you can increase the luminance and the detail of your noise reduction. That will just get rid of all of that fine grain pattern in your image. Then you've got a lens correction. You can either remove chromatic aberration, which is a slight red, green, and blue shift in the image, or alternatively, you can come over to manual and you can change the distortion from the lens so if you are shooting with a wide angle lens, for example, you can fix that by just pulling on the amounts, and you can also increase or decrease a defringing. Then down here you've got transform, then you've got effect so you can see you can add some vignetting or you can add in some stylistic grain, then down here you've got calibration. If your camera is leaning towards a specific color, then you can just come down into calibration and you can recalibrate that. Shifting my green hue over towards the greens rather than yellows just gives my image but of a nicer tone. But this is getting very specific so the main settings that you want to look at are basic and then you want to play with your presets over here. You can also see your progress by the way by coming down to this y y. This was the before, and this is the after. You can see if I add some really dramatic effects on like this, you can say, this is what we started with, and this is what we've ended up with. You can also get really specific by the way, and do some masking so if you go up into this option here, you can see you've got a new mask so you can go select "Subject," select "Sky," brush, "linear," "Radial Gradients," "Color Range," "Luminance Range," and then the "Depth Range" is grayed out at the moment. But let's go for the sky, so we'll select the "Sky". She's going to take a moment to figure out what the sky is. There we go, it's figured out what the sky is in this image, and now from here, we can go and pull the exposure down of just the sky None none of the rest of the image is going to be affected, it will just be the sky. This means we can actually play with the temperature, so we can change the temperature of the sky, we change the tint of the sky, we can change the contrast and only the sky has been affected. This is really starting to look nice and dramatic. As you can see that it's really dramatic at this moment in time, but I'm just showing you how extreme this can be. Once you're happy with that, you can just press Done. Again, this is the before and after. This is where we started, this is where we've ended. But once you're happy, you can just press a library, we'll go back to this grid view, and you just want to select all images in that sequence so go "Command" and "A" we go down to "Sync Settings". Make sure everything here is selected if you've made changes to those. I'll add that masking, I'll add transform, everything here. You can just select check All" if you wanted to, and then just put "Synchronize". There go, you can see one by one, Lightroom is just going to copy and paste the effects from this first image onto all of the other images. Now you can see only this first image has this sky profile change, and that's because this was done using an artificial intelligence so you would have to go through each individual image and rescan to figure out what the sky is. If you didn't care about that, then you can just take that off and paste that onto the rest of the images. Because this first one is the only one with that affected sky, I'm just going to delete that, and now you can see we have got 91 images all with this dramatic moody color grading. To export these from Lightroom and get them into Premiere, we need to highlight them all, so we've got "Command" and "A", then we'll go down to export. That's the bottom left, and then you can see you can export to a specific folder, so we'll go choose. You can put these somewhere where you want them to go so I'm going to put them in the timelapse folder, we'll choose that, then we'll go down, make sure far naming is grayed out, make sure video is grayed out, then fall settings. We want these to be JPEG with a quality of 100 to get the maximum file size and the maximum quality. Then once you're happy with that, all you have to do is just press "Export", and that will export all of those still images into the folder that you chose just a moment ago. But there you go. That is how you import and edit all of your raw files and all of your JPEG image files into Adobe Lightroom. Color all of those that they all now match, and they have the same color correction and color grading. The next step would be to import these into Adobe Premiere Pro. 9. Importing & Editing in Adobe Premiere Pro: Once you've got your timelapse image files ready to go, we need to get them imported into Adobe Premiere. Now, you can either import the JPEG file straight from the camera or you could import the JPEG files that you exported from Adobe Lightroom. The process is exactly the same. Now in Premiere, there are two different ways of importing your timelapse, the easy way and then a slightly more complicated way. The reason why we have two methods is because sometimes the easy way, doesn't always work. Let's run you through the process of how you would input your timelapse into Adobe Premiere. We're inside of Adobe Premiere Pro and as you can see, I haven't created a sequence yet, so that's my first move. I'm going to go into File New Sequence and I'm just going to make a 25 frames per second sequence. Some editing mode should be custom, a time-base of 25 frames per second, frame size 1920 by 1080 square pixels, then everything else is fun. Let's just rename the sequence to timelapse. There we go so, we've got a widescreen video now created. Now we need to go ahead and import one of our timelapses. We'll get into the project bin, right-click import. Then from here, you want to navigate through to a folder where your timelapse files will live. Now it's really important that you organize your timelapse files and you'll images into specific folders. As you can see here, I've got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 folders, which means there's 10 sets of timelapse image files. As you can see in each folder, I've got the unedited. These are the rushes, as you can see CR2 is a Raw file and I've got the edited. It's really important that you follow the structure because one, it helps you figure out where the timelapse starts and ends and it also helps the computer to figure out where the timelapse starts and ends. Let's just go for number 7. We'll get into folder 7 and as you can see, we've got all of these image files. I'm just going to select the first image of the sequence, will go down to options and select image sequence. Now, if you're on Windows, this might look a little different, but you should have the option of importing as an image sequence. You might start to play around with a few different buttons. But this is on Mac and it's just options, image sequence and then you press import and then Premiere would take a moment and it will import all of those images as one video. Now, dragging this onto our timeline presents this clip mismatch warning. This clip does not match the sequence settings, change sequence to match the clip settings. The reason why this is popping up is because our sequence is 1920 by 1080. Generally, when you take a still photo, it's roughly around 5,000 by 4,000 pixels, so it's much larger. If we go keep existing settings, you can see we've zoomed all the way in on this image. We're just going to have to select this and then go into motion scale and pull the scale all the way down until it fills the screen like this. Then if we play this back, you can see a timelapse is now playing out and it's just being treated as a video. If I double-click this, it doesn't separate into stills, it doesn't do anything weird, it's just a normal video on the timeline. This is really good because we haven't had to deal with stitching anything together or speeding anything up, nice, quick and easy. If you've done a really good job of your timelapse. As you can see in this example, the camera's not shaking around and none of the settings have really changed that much. I didn't have to do anything at this stage. That is the first way of importing your timelapse and that is the easy way of importing your timelapse. Now the next way of importing a timelapse is a little bit more complicated, not massively more complicated but it does require a little bit more work. We're going to the project folder and I'm going to create a bin. That's just a folder. We'll just call this timelapse 1. Then we'll go into that, then we'll right-click import, then we'll just go into a different folder. Select a difference timelapse, let's go for 10. Let's go for the first image and instead of selecting image sequence, we want to make sure that it's deselected, then we'll just select all of the images, so command an a and if that's not working, then just select the first one, scroll down, hold shift and select the bottom. Then we'll press Import and that will import all of those as individual images rather than a video. As you can see, we've got all of these images. Now I'm just going to click on name. I'm just going to press that so that they have now descending, so as you can see 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. Then I'm going to go Command an a to highlight them all and hovering over the first image, I'm going to right-click and select new sequence from clip. As you can see, all of those have been imported into their own sequence. Now at the moment, each image is five seconds long, which means we're just going to hover on this first image for five seconds and after five seconds, it will skip to the next. But the problem is, this is way too slow and it's going to take way too long to get through this timelapse. This timelapse is currently 10 hours long. We're just going to highlight all of those images. We'll right-click and select nest, so we're putting all of these into their own nested sequence. We'll call this TL2 and now we can right-click again. We'll go speed/duration and we'll pull the speed all the way up to 99999 and that will tell us that the shortest that we can get this is six seconds. I'll press okay on that. If we wanted this any shorter, we would have to nest again and then we would change the speed of this again, so speed/duration and now we can change the duration to a specific amount, five seconds exactly. Now will play this back and see how this looks. There you go. You can see this timelapse has now successfully being created. However, you can see it must have been a windy day, the camera is fidgeting around a little bit, unfortunately. We would have to go through the process of stabilizing this clip. Now unfortunately, I can't add Warp Stabilizer onto this because I've affected the speed. We need to nest this again. Feel free to rename these nests to keep track of what you're doing. Once you've done that, you can just go into the effects panel, will search for Warp Stabilizer. That should be that under distort Warp Stabilizer. We'll drop that onto our clip. That's just going to take a moment to analyze the footage and it's just going to smooth everything counts. Now because this is a static shot or it's supposed to be a static shot, we can change the result from smooth motion to no motions that it's static. Then we can change the method from subspace warp to position scale rotation, or we can keep it as subspace warp, we'll see what the results are. As you can see, we'll play this back. That has done a perfect job of stabilizing this. This is a static shot. There's no fidgeting around, it's smooth out our timelapse, that's perfectly. Now we can just go ahead and create a brand new 1920 by 1080 composition. We'll call this timelapse 2. Then we can over this composition, we'll right-click and select reveal sequence in Projects, so we know this is the sequence. Then we go back to timelapse 2 and we'll drag that sequence into timelapse 2. Again, like we saw with the first import, we're just going to keep the existing settings and then we can just scale down so that this fills the screen. Now when we play this back, you can see we've got our timelapse perfectly created and imported into a widescreen video. Now of course, because we are in a 1920 by 1080 video and because our image files are much larger than that, we've had to scale this down to 34 percent, which means we can move this all the way up to 100 before we start to lose quality. This means if you wanted to add a nice subtle Zoom in or Zoom out, then you've got the room to do that. If we go to the beginning, creates a brand new keyframe on scale and position. If we then move to the end minus one frame so we can see what we're doing. We can then increase the scale to 50. We can position this so that we're now zooming in to this part of the image. Now when we play this back, we get this really nice subtle Zoom in on this specific landmark. Alternatively, we can swap those keyframes around, so we'll put the first ones at the end and those end ones at the beginning and we're going to get a nice Zoom out instead this time. There you go that looks really cool, I'm really dynamic and of course you can keep experimenting with the possession so you don't have to start up here. You could start down here, for example and that's how that will look, or you can even add some rotation. It's completely up to you and your creativity. That is how you would import your timelapse into Premiere using both methods and then stabilizing that static shot using Warp Stabilizer. 10. Editing & Stabilising in Adobe After Effects: At this moment in time, we've imported our time-lapse two different ways, and we've used Warp Stabilizer to smooth out a little bit of movement. But what if we've got a Gimbal time-lapse or a hyperlapse, how would we do that same process? Well, I'm inside of Adobe Premiere Pro and I've got this Gimbal time-lapse imported. It's a really nice motion, time-lapse panning from left to right. However, it was a little bit windy this day, so I'm going to have to add some Warp Stabilizer onto this in order to smooth out this motion. As you can see, there's just a little bit of a bump and it's ruining the effect. This time, we would have to go Effects, Warp Stabilizer and drag that on. Now, because I have changed the scale of this because it's no longer 100 percent, that means Warp Stabilizer isn't going to work. Before I can drop that on, I have to nest this, so we'll go Nest press "Okay" and then we can drop Warp Stabilizer onto the nested sequence and now that should do what it needs to do. Now, on the last one, I had to change the result from smooth motion to no motion, and that's because it was static. However, because there is movement in this one, we can keep this as smooth motion. Now, under that we've got smoothness, and by default, it will be set to 50 percent and generally you want to leave that at 50 unless you need to clean something up. Again, the method will keep a subspace for now. However, if it looks a little messy, we might have to change this to position scale rotation. As you can see, that is not complete, so let's play this back and see what has happened. There you go. You can see Premiere has done a brilliant job of smoothing out that motion. If we pull the quality up to half, you'll see that even better. This is how smooth it looks after the stabilization. If I turn the stabilization off, you can see it just looks a little bit bumpy, and that's because the wind might have been affecting the Gimbal and moving it around a little bit or even the cars passing by camera by the could have added a little bit of wind that might have moved the camera a little. Just adding Warp Stabilizer has just really polished this hyperlapse or this Gimbal time-lapse off. That is how I would stabilize a moving time-lapse. However, if you were going for something more like a hyperlapse, how would you do that process? Well, Premiere isn't going to cut it, unfortunately. Let me first just import a hyper-lapse. I'm just going to press "Import" and we'll go to Time-lapse 2, which should be a hyperlapse. Press "Import", we'll direct this and we'll keep the existing settings, and now we'll just scale out at around 34 percent. When we play this back, you can see, unfortunately, that is wiggling around everywhere. That does not look pretty. Rather than trying to fix this in Premiere, I'm going to get this into After Effects first and then stabilize it afterwards. To begin with, I'm just going to use that Dynamic Link feature, so I'm just going to right-click on the clip and we'll go replace with After Effects composition and this will ask me to save this, so I'm just going to call this time-lapse. As you can see, we've now got this imported into After Effects where we can now begin fixing this problem. First up, I would just reframe everything. At the moment, if I turn the proportional grid on and I use this tower in the background as this point here, you can see if I move over here, that has drifted all the way over there. The first thing I would need to do is actually just reposition everything so that that is now in the middle. First of all, I will just go in to begin by increasing the scale up to around 50. Then I'll press "P" on the keyboard so I position. We'll zoom into this point, and I'm just going to position the corner of this building at this points. Then I'll create a brand new keyframe on position and I'm just going to walk through frame by frame, making sure that this building is framed up perfectly next to this marker on every single frame. There you go. We've got the first two seconds of this old now line up really nicely. This is actually looking pretty decent so far. It's now actually married up, so that's looking better. However, at this moment in time, it's still a little bit jolty, so we could either run Warp Stabilizer on this or we could actually use the motion tracking in After Effects to really help to smooth this out, and that's the option I'm going to go for. First up, I need to pre-comp this. But before I do that, I'm just going to create a new solid. Make this black, and we just add this behind. The reason why I'm adding this in is because sometimes when you try and pre-compose a single layer, it doesn't work unfortunately, and so just adding a solid there just helps me out later on with the pre-compose. I'm just going to pre-comp that. As you can see, the position keyframes are no longer there. Now I'm just going to trim the end of that off, so I only want to focus on this bit. Now we'll go into the tracking window. Over on the right we've got tracker, so I'm just going to select this pre-comp. We'll go Stabilize Motion and that will create a tracking point. Now, it's up to you to find somewhere in the frame that has a high contrast area. If I zoom in on this building, you can see around here, you've got this black bit here, or you've got this red bits, or there's a nice bit of contrast up here, or alternatively, you can go to somewhere else, but because this is our center point, I'm going to focus on this building. I'll place this roughly around here. I'll place this in these bit here. Now you just once you press "Play", and then make sure that sticks to that point throughout. If it doesn't, then go back and just feel free to move that manually. But it should stick to that pretty well. Now from here we just want to edit target. We'll call this pre-comp 1. Press "Okay". We'll apply this to the x and the y. Now when we play this back, that should have smoothed out that motion. That's looking a lot better already. Of course, we're getting a little bit of jelloing effect on the side. Up here, you can see the top of the frame is jumping around. Let's deal with that problem first. I'm just going to go into Effects and Presets and search for Motion Tile. Drop Motion Tile onto the pre-comp and then the Motion Tile will just change the output width to 300, the output height to 300, and then we'll select mirror edges. That's just going to fill in those gaps. That's looking a lot better already. Now, as you can see, the last half of this is looking really good, but the first half wasn't looking too great. There's a bit of jelloing over here. The reason why that jelloing is happening is because I was still messing around with my settings at the beginning. If this was my example, I would just extend this out and focus on the last half for this because the last half of this is really starting to look great. Now, of course, because this is dynamic linked from Premiere into After Effects, we can actually get back into Premiere and all of the changes would have been applied in here. Hyperlapses can be very finicky in the edit because it depends so heavily on you stabilizing the motion in After Effects and Premiere, it can be a little bit unpredictable and little bit temperamental. Spend some time with your hyperlapses and your time-lapses, get them more smoothed out and feel free to move them frame by frame to get them perfect. But once you've put the work and the effort into a hyperlapse, the results can be absolutely breathtaking. Be really patient when you're editing your hyperlapse because the results can be absolutely brilliant. They just require a little bit more work than your time-lapses do. When you're shooting hyperlapses, you can actually use a dolly track and a motor to get the perfect hyperlapse. That means you don't have to run any stabilization in the edit because it's all been programmed by a motion control device. However, that can get really expensive and it requires a lot of equipment. Just doing this by hand and then fighting with it in the edit a little bit is probably the route that I would suggest. You can get some really dynamic results using this technique. As I say, you just have to put a little bit of work into the edit. 11. Outro: There you go. That is the end of the course. At this moment in time, you should be able to capture an awesome timelapse and a visually engaging hyperlapse. My challenge to you now is to go out and shoot your own timelapse and your own hyperlapse. If you do capture a timelapse and a hyperlapse, then I would love to see your work. Please do consider uploading it to the students' projects section on this course page, and I promise, I will let you know my thoughts and opinions on your work. There you go. If you haven't already, then please do consider checking out some of my other courses. I have video production courses and video editing courses. Consider checking out one of those courses. But either way, whether you do or not, thank you ever so much for watching this course. I really look forward to seeing your work. Have fun capturing your timelapses and you're hyperlapses.