The Art of Timelapse and Hyperlapse Photography

1. Introduction: Hey, everyone. I'm Ian Norman and I'll be your instructor for the Intro to Time-lapse Skillshare course. In this video, I'll give you a brief overview of timelapse photography and what we'll cover in the class. Time-lapse has been growing in popularity in recent years because it's easier to do than ever before. The reason that I think time-lapse is so intriguing is because it literally adds a new dimension to photography. Most of all, time-lapse allows us to witness changes in our world that we otherwise wouldn't be able to see. Clouds spring alive, shadow stretch as the day progresses, and the Milky Way sweeps across the sky as the Earth slowly rotates. It's these kinds of changes that we'll be capturing in this class. The best part about time-lapse is that it's really easy to get started. We'll talk about the very basic equipment that you'll need for your first time-lapse clips, and from there we'll talk about preparation and setup, executing the shoot, and finally methods of compiling all your still images into a final time-lapse video. I hope this class will be an inspiring start for all of you, and I really look forward to seeing all of your class projects. Also, I'm here as an active resource for you. If there's anything you don't understand, if you have any feedback for me, you can post your thoughts and questions in the discussion section of the class. I also recommend sharing your projects with the rest of the class and be sure to give feedback to your classmates. Okay, that's all for my introduction. In the next video lesson, we'll take a look at some of the different tools that we can use to make our first time-lapses. 2. Picking your Timelapse Subject: Hey everyone, welcome back. Let's talk about picking a subject for your time-lapse project. When recording a subject, there's two basic elements in the composition. There's the static setting which is everything in the composition that isn't moving. It's essentially the background of the shot and it's the environment in which your subject lives. The subject is the thing that's moving and changing in the composition. In this example, the setting is the city street and the subject is the traffic. The setting and the subject complement each other, so when picking a subject, try to find the most interesting setting. For example, you might decide that you want your subject to be clouds but a time-lapse of just clouds is a bit less interesting than the time-lapse of clouds at sunset at your favorite spot on the beach. Some of the subjects that I highly recommend for time-lapse are clouds and other weather, sunrises and sunsets, traffic, construction or assembly projects and my all-time favorite, the moon and the stars at night. Most of these things make large changes over time and that's pretty characteristic of most great time-lapse subjects. We want to make sure that our time-lapse subjects showed dynamic and interesting motion. If you're having a hard time deciding what to shoot, remember that you pretty much can't go wrong with slow moving clouds. 3. Timelapse Equipment Introduction: Hey everyone, welcome back. In this video lesson, we'll talk about the equipment that you'll need for making your first timelapses. Timelapse photography is pretty simple and concepts. We'll be shooting a collection of consecutive photos of a single scene that will then compile into a movie that allows us to see how the scene change over time. For the most basic time lapses, all we need is a digital camera and a tripod. The cool thing about timelapse is that you can use pretty much any digital camera, it can be a digital SLR, a point shoot or even your smartphone. The next thing we need to use a tripod. Pretty much any tripod will work, but make sure that it's stable enough for your camera. If I'm on the go and I don't really want to carry around a full-size tripod. Sometimes a travel tripod like the Petco UltraPod or the JOB gorilla pod is fine. Also make sure to learn all the ins and outs of how you use your tripod. For example, my full-size tripod lets me change the angle of the legs so they can set it up low to the ground. My UltraPod allows me to strap my camera do a signpost. One note if you're using a smartphone for your time-lapse projects, you'll need a way to mount it to your tripod, and the best tool that I found for this is called the JOB grip tight. It's a small plant at the tripod screw so you can mount your phone to any camera tripod. It's only about 20 bucks on line and it also comes to the pocket-size tripod. The final tool that will make time-lapse creation super easy is an intervalometer or remote trigger. It's a device that plugs into your digital camera, it can automatically trigger the shutter at any interval that you specify. Most digital SLRs have a port that accepts an intervalometer and some cameras even have a built-in interval timer function. Be sure to check your camera's manual to see if it has a plug for remote trigger or if it has a built-in interval timer function. If you're using a smart phone you're in luck, there's a large selection of apps available for your smart phone that have a built-in interval timer function. The one app that I recommend most is called Camera Awesome, and it's available for both iOS and Android. Camera Awesome is different than most other time-lapse apps for your phone because it allows you to save the individual time-lapse frames at full resolution. We'll want to be able to make sure that we can use the full resolution images so that we have the ability to crop and correct the photos before we compile them into our final time-lapse movie. Finally, if you don't have an interferometer or you don't want to use a smart phone app, you can also make your time-lapse manually, but that means that you'll need to be at your camera pressing the shutter throughout the duration of the time-lapse. It's doable but it often requires a fair bit of concentration. If you get distracted and change the rate that you press the shutter your time-lapse, this will probably end up having jumps in motion. If you want the smoothest easiest results, the investment in an interval timer or the Camera Awesome app for your smartphone, it's definitely worthwhile. With a camera on a tripod and then intervalometer, you have everything you need to make your first timelapse. 4. Setting Up and Shooting your Timelapse: Hey everyone, welcome back. Before we press start on our interval timers and start making photos, there's some simple pre-planning and camera setup that'll give us the best results when shooting our timelapses. We should do some simple math so that we can figure out how long we need to take photos for a timelapse sequence. My general recommendation is, to capture at least 240 photos per timelapse clip. Since standard motion pictures usually run at about 24 frames per second, 240 frames will give us a final timelapse clip, that's about 10 seconds long. Setting this limit prevents you from taking too many photos that just one scene, which should be long enough that you'll capture an adequate amount of motion. Also,10 seconds is about the maximum attention span of your audience for a single clip. It's much more interesting to watch a series of multiple 10-second clips, rather than a single timelapse clip that lasts for minutes. So, for a first timelapse clip, let's stick with 240 frames. Now, that we know how many photos we need to take, the next thing to determine is, the interval of time between shots. It's usually best to pick an interval based on how fast your subject is moving. I like to categorize most timelapse subjects into three different speed categories. Fast, medium, and slow. Examples of fast-moving subjects include traffic, crowds, and parties, and clouds on a really windy day. For fast-moving objects, you should use an interval of about one to two seconds. Medium-speed subjects include sunrises, sunsets, and slow-moving clouds, and call for an interval of about two to five seconds. Examples of slow-moving objects include assembly and construction projects, and the stars in the night sky. Slow-moving objects usually call for an interval of about 10 to 30 seconds long. Keep in mind that some cameras might need extra interval time to save the photos to the memory card. If you pick too short of an interval, and your camera is still trying to write the files, it might not be ready to shoot the next photo and could end up skipping a frame. This can be especially common if you decide to shoot your photos in raw format since the file sizes will be much bigger. Most digital SLR is have a light that indicates when it's writing to the memory card. I recommend paying attention to how long the right light stays lit on your camera, after taking a photo, and pick an interval time that's at least a full second longer. I usually find that if I choose an interval time of more than five seconds, most cameras can easily keep up. Once we roughly determine our interval, we can calculate how many minutes it will take to capture timelapse. We multiplied the number of frames by the interval, and divide by 60. For example, let's say, we want to record 240 frames total, and we decide an interval of five seconds, 240 multiplied by five seconds is 1,200 seconds. Finally, we can divide that by 60 seconds per minute to get 20 minutes, which is how long it will take to complete our timelapse sequence. Now, before you press Start button, there are two last things that we should do. Lock our exposure and lock our focus. If we don't lock our exposure focus, the camera will have to refocus and recalculate exposure for every single shot. This has some disadvantages. It'll drain your battery faster, and it can cause flickering in the final timelapse. If you're using the camera awesome app, you can just tap with two fingers to separate your focus point, and your exposure metering point. Once you've moved the focus and exposure points to where you want them, you can tap them again, to lock them in place for the duration of the timelapse. If you're using a digital SLR or other camera with manual controls, you want to change to manual exposure mode and set your f number, shutter speed, and ISO. I recommend starting with a low ISO like ISO 100, or 200, and a relatively high F number, like F8, or F11, then adjust your shutter speed until the exposure meter is roughly centered. Finally, take a test shot to see how the exposure looks. If it's too dark, use a slower shutter speed, if it's too bright, use a faster shutter speed. Once you have your exposure set, you should be ready to lock your focus. A quick way to do this is, to just auto focus on the scene, and then switch the lens to manual focus. Or, if you want to ensure the absolute best focus, enable live view, and use manual focus in conjunction with the magnify function to check your focus. All right. Now, that we have the intervalometer program, the exposure locked, and the focus locked, we are ready to press Start, and wait for the timelapse to finish. Take a look at the clock and sit back while your camera shoots away. 5. Batch Processing Timelapse Frames in Adobe Lightroom: Everyone, welcome back. In this video lesson we'll be using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom to edit all the photos that we took during our time-lapse shoot. So right now, I've got my photos imported into my Lightroom catalog, and you can see that I have a whole bunch of photos that all look the same. So, the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to put these into their own collection. So, I'm going to select all the photos, and then I'll just right click, and click "Add to Quick Collection", and that'll put them over here in the quick collection underneath your catalog. So, if I select that I can see all 240 photos from my time-lapse. We're going to go ahead and save that as it's own collection. So, let's name it Clouds and Cranes since that's what the time-lapse is of. All right. So, now that I've put that underneath our collections, so if I select the first photo in our time-lapse sequence, I can scroll through the photos relatively quickly, and you can see how the time-lapse turned out, just to give ourselves a preview. All right. So, that looks pretty good. So, I can go ahead and take a look at all our photos again by pressing G. All right. So, now I'm going to select my first frame, and we're going to go to the develop module by pressing either D, or selecting Develop at the top toolbar. Mostly, adjustments that I make are just going to be with the basic adjustments and the tone curve. I don't like to really edit a whole lot with the other adjustments. You can disable or re-enable any given toolbar by right-clicking on the toolbar and selecting what you want, so I've got basic, and tone curve selected here. So, the very first thing that we want to do before we do any adjustments for color, contrast, or exposure, or anything like that is adjust our crop. So, I've got a couple of things in this photograph that I want to do with a crop, one of them is to get rid of this little light post on the edge of the frame, which just happened to sneak in because I didn't really see it in the view finder, but we'll go ahead and get rid of it with a crop. The other thing is to crop it so that it matches a standard high definition aspect ratio, the most common of which is 16 by 9. So, I'm going to select 16 by 9 from the drop down here, and then go ahead and make my adjustments for the crop. So, crop up that thing on the side, and then I'll go ahead and bring it back down so we can still see the bottom of the frame. Well, it looks pretty good. So, now that we have the image cropped, we can go ahead and move down to our sliders. The very first thing that's shown is white balance. There's a few different ways to do it here. There's a bunch of different presets we can have it automatically calculate the white balance or select it for different types of light. I was shooting in daylight, so actually daylight seemed to work pretty well, pretty close. So you can, of course, adjust it manually so you can make it cooler, or make a little bit warmer, if you like. Let's try daylight for this particular one. So, next is exposure. My exposure looks pretty good here. It's actually just about right. It's not too dark, not too bright. If I wanted to bring out a little bit more contrast in the sky, maybe make the sky a little bit darker blue, I could pull my exposure down just a little bit, maybe like half a stop. Then if we want to bring out some contrasts in the clouds so that we can see the clouds a little bit more defined against the dark blue sky, we can increase the contrast with a contrast slider. Now, these four sliders on the bottom are helpful for high dynamic range situations, where you've got something that's really bright, and another thing that's really dark. In this image, you can see that the bottom of the image is relatively dark. So, I might want to try and recover some of the detail in there that I'm losing, especially as I increase the contrast of the image. So, one of the helpful things to do there is to just loose the shadows of the image. That brings out a lot of detail at the bottom of the frame there. You can make some minor adjustments to highlights, whites and blacks as well. Highlights will adjust just the brighter volumes of the image. If you had some areas that were overblown or too bright, maybe like in this cloud, you could get a little bit more detail out of it if you reduce the slider there. Then whites and blacks will just adjust the extremes. You can see that it just flattens out some of the really bright areas of the image. I'm going to keep whites and blacks for now. I usually only use this in really extreme situations. Now, at the bottom of the basic adjustments toolbar we have the presence sliders, we have clarity, vibrance, and saturation. Clarity is one that can really make an image look great, but you can also overdo it. So, it increases micro-contrasts in the image, and really makes things pop. If you pull to the other side, obviously, you can see also it does the exact opposite, it makes everything like flat and greeny. I was going to push the clarity up just a little bit, maybe around 30 or so for this image. There's vibrance and saturation. These both affect colors, but they do in different ways. Let me show you the difference here. So if I increase the vibrance, it makes everything more saturated, but it also darkens the sky. Then if I increase the saturation, it makes the sky bluer, but it doesn't darken it at all, it just keeps it bright. I think that tends to make the image look a little fake, adjustments in the saturation slider should be done minimally, and vibrance it's usually okay to push it a little bit more, you can still keep it looking relatively natural. Then for my final adjustments, I use the tone curve. The tone curve basically allows you to make some final tweaks in the brightness of the image and lets you adjust values from light to dark. So, if we wanted to we can pull up their right side of the graph, which represents the brighter portion of the image, and that'll make the brights brighter. If we were to pull down the left side of the graph, that makes the dark portions of the image darker. So, it's a way to increase contrast. I'll just make just a slight increase on the highlights just to give a little bit more pop, and then pull down the darks just slightly. All right. So, that just about covers it for our basic adjustments. For the most part, you can do pretty much all of your editing, just the basic sliders and the tone curve. Now that we have that adjusted, we're ready to apply all of these edits to our entire collection of 240 photos. So, I'm going to go ahead and go back to library either by pressing G or selecting Library on the top. You can see the difference between our edited photo and our unedited photos. What we want to do is we want to be able to apply the same adjustments that we made to our first photo to all 240 frames. Since we have everything in it's own collection, we can just select everything by hitting command A, or control A. What we can do is we just click "Sync Settings", and Sync Settings will open up this dialogue where we can select what we want to synchronize in terms of settings, and since we're doing a time-lapse and we want everything to look the same, we're going to just check everything and click "Synchronize." So, what that just did is it applied all the same settings that we made to our single photograph to all 240 of our frames. So, you don't have to actually wait for all these previews to update if you don't want to, you can go ahead and just export your images, but sometimes I like to review the time lapse, to preview it before I export everything. So, sometimes it's nice to actually wait for it to generate all of the previews. So now that all the previews are generated, we can take a look at our time-lapse just by selecting everything and hitting enter. We can go ahead and retract these toolbars on the side by clicking the arrows. If we just hold down the arrow keys left and right, we can scroll through the time lapse and see how it progresses. Yeah, so that's pretty good. So, once you're satisfied with all of your edits, you should be ready to export everything. So, we can select everything again just by hitting control A, or command A. Then on the left side toolbar at the bottom here, we can click the Export button. What we're going to want to do is we're going to want to export these to jpeg. Select "Export to Hard Drive", then select a folder that you want to export it to, I'm just going to export it to my desktop. I'll put it in a sub-folder and I'll call it Clouds and Cranes. Then next we want to make sure that we rename all of our images using a custom name and then sequence. This is pretty important so that the time-lapse compiler knows what photograph came first, and it puts it all in the right order. So custom name and sequence, and then give it a custom name. I am calling this one Clouds and Cranes, and I'm giving a start number of one, of course. One thing to note if you're using Windows is you'll want to number your files with a 001 starting number instead of just one, and that has to do with how Windows orders it's files in the file manager. On Mac, you can do it either way, either enter one or 001 and it'll work fine, but it's really important that if you're on Windows to enter in 001 only. We want to export it to jpeg because it's an easy to handle file format. I usually like to put a little bit of compression on it, so actually not use 100 percent quality, but about 95. Usually, quality between 95 and 100 is about the same, but it reduces the file sizes quite a bit so that you don't end up filling up your hard drive really quickly with all these exported time-lapse files. Then I usually just use the SRGB part of space because that's what most monitors use, and since we're going to be viewing this time-lapse on a computer monitor anyway, this will give you best color rendition. We want to make all of the photos the same resolution as a full HD video, which is 1920 pixels wide by 1080 pixels high. That's a standard resolution for a 1080p HD video. Then we can apply some final sharpening for the screen, I usually like to use a relatively low sharpening amount. Then we're ready to press Export. So, the export process will take a little bit of time, and then you can review the final images once they've exported on the folder on your desktop wherever you exported them to. In the next video lesson I'll show you how to take all of your exported files and compile them into the final video, and then import them into your favorite video editor for sharing. 6. Compiling the Timelapse: Hey everyone, welcome back. In the last video lesson, we edited all of our time-lapse frames in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and so now, we're ready to compile all those images into a final time-lapse movie. So, I've got my files here on my desktop in a folder called clouds and cranes, and you can see all 240 of our frames. So, I'd like to use a simple program called Time Lapse Assembler for macOS. You can download Time Lapse Assembler on macupdate.com and I've included a link to it in the project guide below this video. It's really simple to use, all we need to do is choose the folder where all of our time-lapse frames are, click open and then set the parameters for our time-lapse. I like to use the mp4v format for sharing. It's relatively small file size and it's easy to upload to YouTube or Vimeo. So, that's what I recommend you use. If you want something that's a little higher quality to save, you can use photo-jpeg or raw, but your file sizes will be larger, although the quality will be slightly better than if you use mp4v or h.264. So, I'll select mp4v for now. We're going to use a frame rate of 24 frames per second which should give us about 10 seconds of video with our 240 frames total. We're going to go ahead and select this, resize and scale proportionally. We're going to use a width of 1920 pixels which should give us the standard HD resolution output. Finally, we'll set quality to max. One thing to note, is that Time Lapse Assembler will default to lower resolution if you don't select resize and scale proportionally. So, you want to be able to select these two check boxes and make sure that you're using 1920 pixels wide. Then, we're ready to click encode. I'll save this as clouds and cranes. So, if you're using Windows instead of macOS, I recommend a different program called PhotoLapse 3 and I'll include a download link to that program in the project guide below. So, PhotoLapse 3 is really similar, you can just select the folder that contains all of your time-lapse files and then you can click "Load files from current folder". It'll go through and generate a list of all your images. So once that finishes, you can enter in the FPS or frames per second of your video and we want to use 24 frames per second and then you're ready to click "Create Movie". So, I'll save this as the default name and then click "OK" to save the full frames of uncompressed video. Then PhotoLapse 3 will go through and compile all your frames into the final video. All right. Now, that we have everything compiled, we can click on our movie and check it out and make sure that everything looks good. All right. So, that looks pretty good. So now, we're ready to do whatever we want with our final video. You can upload it to YouTube or Vimeo. I usually like to pull it into my favorite movie editor. I use Final Cut Pro, but you can use iMovie or Adobe Premiere or Windows Movie Maker, it doesn't really matter. I like to cut it in with other time-lapse clips and maybe add some music or something like that. So, I'll go ahead and show you guys how to do that here. So, first thing I'm going to do is create a new sample project. I'll just call this the "Skillshare Timelapse Sample" and then I'll go ahead and take my clouds and cranes movie and pull it into my event library in order to import it into the program. Then, I'll just drag the time-lapse to the timeline. I'm going to go ahead and pull in some of the other clips that are recorded for this class, along with that time-lapse. So, I'll just add some of these other things in there so that we have a little bit of variety. We'll go for just about one minute of time of videos, a bunch of little random of clips, right, but it should be interesting. Maybe a little bit of music. If you're looking for music for your time-lapse videos, I really recommend that you find something that's open-source. One of the best resources that I found for this is a website called Jamendo. Jamendo claims it's the world's biggest library of music and a lot of its license under the Creative Commons license. What Creative Commons is, is it's basically an open license so that everybody can use this music for free. I like to use music in particular that has specific type of license called Attribution-ShareAlike. What Attribution-ShareAlike lets you do as it says here on the Creative Commons website, you're free to share, copy, redistribute the material in any medium or format and you can adapt, remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially. So, what that means is that we can take any of these songs, add it to our video, which is consider like an adaptation or like a remix or transform of the material, and then we can share that again with the world so long as we ShareAlike, meaning that we should release the material that we use in our video under the same license so that anybody can use the work that we have. So under Jamendo, you can really simply just search for your music. I'd like to search by genre. So, I'm going to be searching for something like, perhaps search like instrumental. We're going to go into actually the advanced search here. We're going to look for that Creative Commons license that we like to use. So, I'm looking for Attribution-ShareAlike stuff and maybe I want something that's like a postrock feel. So, I'm looking for instrumental postrock. One of the songs that I found in my searching in the past, was this one called Prequel by While They Were Sleeping. So, I'm going to go ahead and download that song. You can see that they're distributing it under the Creative Commons license saying that you can copy, distribute, advertise, and play this album as long as you give credit to the artists and distribute all derivative works under the same license. So, props to While They Were Sleeping for distributing their music for free. Okay. So now, that that's downloaded, I can go ahead and pull it into my movie editor. I'll just drag and drop it into my event library and I should see it here, then I can just pull the song down into the timeline. So, once you're satisfied with the video clips and the song that you've chosen for your time-lapse movie, you should be ready to export it and share it to YouTube. So, I'll go ahead and export what I have here. You can see the example in the next video. 7. Closing Remarks and Adding Motion in Timelapse II: Hello everyone. Welcome back. I hope you enjoyed this class. By now you should have everything you need to shoot at it and compile a timelapse sequence. So be sure to upload your final video to Vimeo or YouTube, and be sure to share the link to your video on your project page. If you have any questions, you can start a conversation in the discussion section of the class. Now that you've mastered the basic workflow of time lapse, you're ready to start the next class in this three-class series on timelapse. The next class we'll cover timelapse with camera motion. You might have noticed that some of the examples used in this class show subtle camera motion. It's an effect that adds a lot of visual appeal to your timelapse. But usually you need really expensive equipment like a timelapse dolly or a motorized slider in order to make these types of sequences. So in the next class, which I've called Timelapse Two- The Art of Hyperlapse, I'll teach you how to shoot and edit a hyperlapse sequence which is a timelapse with extreme amounts of camera motion over really large distances. It's a pretty amazing technique to learn. The best part about it is that it requires no special equipment. Thanks so much for taking this class. I hope you enjoyed it and I really look forward to seeing all of your class projects. I'll see you in the next class. 8. Motion Types and Anchor Points: Everyone, welcome to The Art of Hyperlapse. This is the second course in a three-part time-lapse series, and in the last class we learned all the skills necessary to shoot, edit and compile a time-lapse sequence, and in this class, we'll learn about Hyperlapse. Hyperlapse differs from other types of time-lapse with camera motion because the camera moves over really large distances. The best part about Hyperlapse is that it's really easy to get started, and surprisingly, requires no special equipment. All we need is a camera, and in the example for this class I'll actually be using my smartphone. So, before we start shooting, let's talk about the four basic types of camera motion that we can use in our Hyperlapses. The first one is called a dolly push, and that's when the camera moves toward the subject. The opposite is called a dolly pull. Next one, we move the camera from right to left, we call that a truck left, and the opposite is called a truck right. The next and probably most important thing to talk about is the anchor point. Every Hyperlapse sequence has an anchor point, even if it might not be initially obvious. In this example, it's in the center of the frame on the top of the building, and you can see that the anchor point stays in a fixed position on the screen. So, let's see if you can find the anchor points on the next few Hyperlapse clips. In the first one, it was in the center of the screen at the top of the dome, and in the second, it's also on the top of the dome, but this time it's off center to the right, and on the last clip, it's actually on the far right corner of the building on the right side of the screen. The type of motion and the anchor point that you choose will drastically affect the look of the resulting Hyperlapse, so I recommend trying a few different types of motion and experiment with different types of anchor points. Remember that it doesn't always need to be in the center of your subject, or in the center of the screen. The only thing that's left is to pick your favorite local landmark as a subject. In the next video lesson, we'll learn how to execute the shoot. 9. Hyperlapse Shooting Techniques: Hey everyone, welcome back. In the last video lesson, we learned about different types of motion and how to pick anchor points. So by now, you should have a pretty good idea of which local landmark you want to use for your first hyperlapse. For this example, I'm going to use the Berlin Cathedral in Berlin, Germany. It's one of my favorite buildings in the area and it's a really great subject for hyperlapse. I'll also be using my smartphone for this example, but remember that any digital camera should work just fine. Just remember to have a clear memory card and a full battery. If you're using a smartphone, I recommend that you use an advanced camera app like Camera Awesome. We use it in the first class in the series. I like Camera Awesome in particular because you can use it to separately lock your focus and exposure points to anywhere on the frame. So in preparation for the shoot, the first thing to do is to pick your path. I'm going to do a truck left in this example. I'm going to use the lines in the sidewalk as a guide. I think that this is a really helpful technique to use. So, I suggest trying to find or even create some sort of straight line on your path on the ground to make the creation of the hyperlapse easier. The second thing we need to do is to pick our anchor point and lock our focus. I'm going to use the top of the dome, so I'll set and lock my focus point there as a frame marker. On my digital camera, I'd first focus on my desire to anchor point, set the lens to manual focus, and then I'd use one of the focus marks or grid lines as a frame marker on the anchor point. Now that we know our path, and we figured out our anchor point, the last preparation is to lock the exposure. In this example, I'll lock the exposure on the building. Remember that you can lock your exposure on your digital camera by setting it to manual exposure mode, and manually setting the ISO, f-number and shutter speed, just like we did in the first time-lapse class. Now that we have everything set, we're ready to shoot. All we need to do is take a photo with our framework around the anchor point. Then take a step along the path and take another photo, making sure that we keep the frame marker on the same anchor point. Then we can just repeat this until we reach the end of our path. The rate of your hyperlapse will depend a lot on how large of steps that you take. So, if you take larger steps, the hyperlapse will result in faster motion. If you take smaller steps, the hyperlapse will result in slower motion. I generally like taking smaller steps if possible because it results in more frames and smoother motion. It's really important that you try to maintain the same anchor point throughout the entire hyperlapse. So once you reach the end of your path, you should have a rough hyperlapse sequence. So in the next video lesson, we'll learn a couple of methods for stabilizing the raw hyperlapse sequence. 10. Stabilizing with YouTube: Hey everyone, welcome back. In the last video lesson, we learned how to shoot a Hyperlapse sequence. So, now we should be ready to stabilize our footage. The first and simplest method is to actually use the stabilization algorithm in YouTube. It's not the fastest method, but it doesn't require any special software like Adobe After Effects and it actually works almost as well. First, we'll compile our sequence just like we would any other time-lapse. I'm using a free program called Time Lapse Assembler for Mac and I've included download links to it and Photo Labs 3 for Windows and the project guide below. So, open Time Lapse Assembler and we'll pick the folder that contains all the photos from our hyperlapse sequence and then we'll set our Codec to mp4, Framerate of 24 frames per second. We'll resize and scale proportionately the output movie, so that it's 1920 pixels wide, which is standard HD resolution. We'll make sure the quality is set to max and then we're ready to pressing code. I'll just save it to the default location for now. So, once that's finished encoding, you should have an unstable hyperlapse sequence that's ready to upload to YouTube. So, I'll go to youtube.com/upload and I'll click the Select Files to upload button and find my unstable hyperlapse sequence and I'll click Upload here. Now I'll just name this the hyperlapse YouTube stabilization example and wait for it to upload. So, when it's finally finished uploading, click on the Video Manager at the bottom of the page and then we'll find our hyperlapse sequence. We will click on the little drop-down arrow next to the Edit button and select Enhancements. So, on the enhancements page, all we need to do is click the Stabilize button on the right side of the screen and you can see that it gives us a preview of the stabilized version of the hyperlapse sequence. You can add any other enhancements or fixes that you might want to include and then all you need to do is click the Save button and then YouTube will take some time to process the final hyperlapse sequence. So, you'll have to wait for a little while, while it finishes processing. So, once it's done processing, you can click Play and see the final result, that looks pretty good. So, now that YouTube's finished processing, we can go back to the Video Manager button and then we can download our movie to our desktop by selecting the drop-down next to the Edit button and then clicking Download MP4 and I'll just save it to my desktop. Then you should be able to open the file and see the final result. Here's another example of a different hyperlapse sequence that I've uploaded to YouTube and applied the enhancements to and you can see that YouTube does a really great job of stabilization. In the next video lesson, we'll talk about how to use Adobe After Effects to do the same sort of stabilization. 11. Advanced Stabilizing in Adobe After Effects: Hey, everyone, welcome back. In the last video lesson, we used the built-in YouTube stabilization algorithm to stabilize our hyperlapse. YouTube is nice because it's completely free, but it doesn't really give us very much control over the stabilization technique, and sometimes it doesn't do the best job. The very best form of stabilization that's available now is through Adobe After Effects and you can download a trial version of Adobe After Effects in the link in the project guide below. The first thing that we're going to do in Adobe After Effects is import all of our individual photos by selecting File, Import and then selecting the very first photograph, and we should check to see that jpeg sequence is selected. This support all of the photos from our hyperlapse sequence. So, once the jpeg sequence has been imported into your project, you should check and make sure that the frame rate is set to 24 frames per second, and we'll do this by right clicking on the jpeg sequence, and selecting Interpret Footage, and then Main, and then we should look over at the Frame Rate here and make sure that that's set to 24 frames per second, and we can click Okay. So, the next thing we want to do is drag our jpeg sequence into a new composition. By dragging it over the Create New Composition button and then we're actually ready to stabilize by right clicking on the composition layer, and selecting Warp Stabilizer. Then After Effects will go through and process all our frames and stabilize our footage. You can check on the progress of this in the Effects Control toolbar. In the Effects Control, we also have a few different options for our stabilization, so for example we can choose the level of smoothness of the stabilization and that'll determine how much warping and cropping the stabilization algorithm uses to stabilize our hyperlapse sequence. So, once Warp Stabilizer has finished processing, we can check to see what our sequence looks like by pressing the Play button in the Preview toolbar or we can press Spacebar to initiate playback. That looks pretty good. So, now that our hyperlapse is stabilized, we're ready to export, so we can click File, Export and then select Add to Render Queue and that'll add our sequence down here to the render queue. Then we want to make some adjustments to the output modules so our file sizes aren't too big. So, I'm going to click on where it says Lossless here and that brings up the Output Module Settings window, and over on the right here, I'm going to select Format Options, and then under Video Codec, I'll scroll down and I'll actually select Photo JPEG, which is my preferred method for creating a really high-quality file that you can edit later. Then I'll use a little bit of compression and bring it down to about 95 or so, and that keeps file sizes relatively reasonable. Then finally, I'll go ahead and select the output size that I want. I want this to be roughly 10 ADP so I'll select HDTV 1080 at 24 frames per second, and then I can click Okay. All right now, we should be ready to render, so all we have to do is click the Render button. Then After Effects will go through and render each frame into our output movie. So now, we should be able to go and open up our movie and see how it did. That looks pretty good. So, sometimes After Effects it doesn't always do the best job at stabilization, so I'm going to show you one more method that allows us to stabilize our footage with a little more accuracy. So, I have another hyperlapse sequence here and I've already imported all of my frames and created new composition. So, the first thing that I want to do is make sure that I have my Tracker toolbar open, so I'll go to Window and make sure that Tracker is selected, and that'll bring up this toolbar over here on the bottom right. Now that we have our Tracker toolbar enabled, we can select Stabilize Motion, and then down on Track Type, we'll make sure that that says Stabilize, and then we'll make sure the check boxes for Position and Rotation are selected. What that'll do is that'll create two different tracking points that we can move around the composition. In each of these tracking points has a different role. Tracking point one will track for position and then tracking point two will track for rotation. So, tracking point one needs to move to our anchor point, tracking point two should be moved to a portion of the image that says relatively still relative to our anchor point throughout the entire sequence. So in this example, my anchor point will be this top window on this tower, and I'll adjust the outer box on the tracking point to give it a little bit more leeway for our unstable footage. What this box does is it tells After Effects where it should look for the feature that's in the center box, and then I'll move tracking point two to this lower window on the bottom of the tower. So, for most hyperlapses that use a track left or track right, I recommend selecting your tracking points based on some sort of vertical feature like the corner of a building or in this case, I'm using the two windows on the building. Basically, we want two features that aren't expected to move relative to each other in position or rotation. So, I'll go ahead and adjust the tracking boxes so that they're a little bit larger so that After Effects searches for our feature over a larger area, this is really important for our initial footage because it's pretty jittery and the feature is expected to move around a whole bunch. Then we can start clicking through the frames under analyze and when we're confident that it's tracking it pretty well, we can go ahead and click the Play button under analyze and that will go through each frame and track the two points that we specified. So, now that After Effects inspect all our points across the entire hyperlapse sequence, we can go ahead and click Apply, and then make sure that it applies it to both dimensions X and Y and click Okay. So, if you press Spacebar to see how After Effects did, we can see how it rotated each frame, so that our two tracking points stay relatively stationary. So, that's a relatively good start, but you can see that we still have some jitteriness on the corners. So, the next thing that we're going to do is we're going to take this composition that we did the initial tracking stabilization on and we're going to drag it to the Create New Composition button, and create another sub composition, and then we'll apply Warp Stabilizer to this new composition. So, once Warp Stabilizer finishes, we can go ahead and press Spacebar to see what the final result looks like, so that looks pretty good but you can still see that we have some black edges showing up on the corners. So, we'll go ahead and drag our video footage to fit a little bit better in the bounding box, by selecting one of the corners, and be sure to hold down Shift so that you keep the same aspect ratio, and it looks just about right. Then we can go ahead and check and make sure that none of those black corner show up again by pressing Spacebar to review the footage. That looks pretty good so we're ready to export just like before. So, I'll select File, Export, Add to Render Queue and then I'll adjust my Export options under the Output Module Settings, and I'll select photo jpeg for the format option, and set compression to 95 percent and then I'll do the final resize at HDTV 1080 at 24 frames per second, and then click Okay. Now, we're ready to click Render. So, once After Effects has finished rendering, we can open up and file and see how it did. So, if doing a single pass of Warp Stabilizer isn't working very well for your hyperlapse sequence, using the motion tracker points can help you gain some more control over the stabilization. That just about covers it for the best ways to stabilize your hyperlapse footage. Now that you have a fully stabilized hyperlapse sequence, you should be ready to cut it in your favorite video editor, maybe add some music and then upload it to YouTube. 12. Camera Preparation and Setup: Hey everyone, welcome to the third and final class in this three part series on time-lapse photography. In this class, we'll shoot and edit a data night time-lapse sequence. This type of time-lapse shooting is often referred to as the holy grail of time-lapse because it typically captures changes in light, they can span more than 20 stops of dynamic range. This class will show you the simplest method of shooting a holy grail time-lapse sequence without the use of any special equipment. All you need is a camera with manual controls, a stable tripod and an interferometer. Just like in the first time-lapse class in the series, we'll be shooting our raw sequence in manual exposure mode, and we'll also want to make sure that our photos are being saved in raw format. Since we'll be shooting a transition from day to night, we have a few specific camera setup and exposure rules that we want to follow, our lens should be set to manual focus so that it doesn't change during the sequence, we should also use a fixed f-number for the entire duration of the time-lapse. I also generally recommend shooting wide open at the lowest f-number that your lens supports. Since the aperture blades of most automatic lenses don't always close consistently from shot to shot, stopping down a lens can lead to flickering in the time-lapse, which is one more thing to correct and post-processing. This problem won't be apparent if you're shooting wide open or if you're using a manual aperture lens, if you do want to stop down your automatic lens to increase sharpness, you can prevent flickering by locking the aperture blades and place using the lens twist method. This is done by selecting our desired f-number, and holding down the depth of field preview button, and then twisting the lens just a few degrees so that it loses connection with a camera, but it's still firmly mounted to the camera. The next rule that we need to set is our interval, a complete transition from just before sunset until night usually takes about 1.5 to 2 hours. In order to have between two hundred and forty and four hundred photos by the end of the sequence, we want to shoot at an interval between 15 and 30 seconds, so that we have enough time between exposures to change camera settings as the light changes. I'll be using an interval of about 15 seconds for my example holy grail time-lapse sequence, now that we know our interval, we need to know how to set a long shutter speed limit, this is just a mental note of the slowest shutter speed that we will allow ourselves to use. I generally like to have about 10 seconds of time to change settings. So, if I'm using an interval of about 15 seconds, I want to limit my shutter speed to 5 seconds at the very longest. Since we're starting in the sequence in daylight, we should start with a low ISO of about 100 or 200. Now, that you have your aperture set and locked, in interval chosen with a mental note of your shutter speed limit, you can set your initial shutter speeds so that your camera's exposure meter is roughly centered. In the next video lesson, I'll very quickly cover shooting and how to adjust your exposure during the holy grail sequence. 13. Shooting a Holy Grail Timelapse Sequence: Hey, everyone. In the last video lesson, we prepared our cameras for shooting. So, we should be ready to press the start button on our interferometer. As the time lapse is shooting, periodically review the photo on the back of the camera and look at the light meter. As it gets darker, wait for the light meter to eventually drop to negative one exposure value. Once it gets there, you can use the delay between shots to adjust the shutter speed by one stop to bring the exposure roughly back to zero exposure value. Don't worry too much about changing the shutter speed right when it's dropped to at least negative one exposure value. It's okay if the camera takes a bunch of slightly underexposed photos. Even negative two exposure value is fine as we'll correct for this later in post-processing. The key here is patience. We want to make our adjustments only periodically, but often enough that the exposure doesn't get overly dark. I usually don't expect to make more than about 10 to 20 exposure adjustments throughout the entire time-lapse sequence, so that means that we usually need to wait until the camera shoots at least 20 to 40 photos between adjustments. At some point in the sequence as it gets really dark, you may reach your predetermined long shutter speed limit. At this point, all further adjustments should be with the ISO setting. In the same manner as adjusting the shutter speed, wait until the exposure meter reads at least negative one exposure value, and then bump your ISO up one stop until it's back at zero exposure value. You should also use the image preview as a guide. If it looks like a good exposure, wait a little bit longer before making the next adjustment. Finally, when making the adjustments, be careful not to bump the tripod or shake the camera too much. Once you're finished shooting, you should have a time-lapse sequence that shows some distinct jumps and exposure from each adjustment that we made. In the next video lesson, I'll show you how to use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and LR time-lapse to level all of the exposure jumps across the sequence. 14. Exposure Leveling in Lightroom and LRTimelapse: Hey everyone, welcome back. In the last video lesson, we recorded our holy grail time-lapse sequence. In this video lesson, we'll level the exposure of the sequence to smooth out the exposure jumps. Will be using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and a program called LR Timelapse. I've included download links to the trial versions of Lightroom and LR Timelapse in the project guide below. Once we have all our photos imported into Lightroom, we can scroll through the sequence using the arrow keys to see what it looks like. You can see that we have some pretty distinct flashes from all the exposure adjustments. So let's level those jumps in exposure in LR Timelapse. When LR Timelapse is open, select the folder of your time-lapse sequence and select the Holy Grail Workflow tab, and then click initialize. When it's done initializing, press the Keyframes Wizard button. If you used a manual lens or locked your aperture with the lens twist method, it'll ask you if you want to add aperture inflammation to the sequence. I set my aperture F4.0 so I'll click yes select F4.0 and then click okay. So what that just did was make a key frame at all of the areas in the sequence where we changed the exposure. Now, that the key frames are generated, we can click the Holy Grail Wizard button and that'll equalize the exposure across the time-lapse sequence. You can see the yellow graph of the exposure compensation on the preview. Now, let's see what that looks like an Adobe Lightroom by clicking the Save button. The way LR timelapse works is by saving separate metadata files called XMP sidecar files with all of the information about exposure and color balance in them. So, when we go back to Lightroom, we can load the data from the sidecar files by selecting all of the photos with command A, and then right-clicking select metadata and read metadata from files, and you can see that it changed the exposure in all of the files to reflect the adjustments from LR Timelapse. Let's take a look at the last image here. So it looks like it made the whole sequence a little bit too bright. So let's crack this by going back to LR Timelapse and then adjusting the offset slider to reduce the overall exposure, and then I'll adjust the rotate slider a bit so that the sequence gradually gets darker as it transitions into night just as we would expect. I'll click save again and then return to Lightroom. Let's take a look at only our key frames by filtering by attribute and showing only photos with a rating of at least one star. Now, we still need to load our recently adjusted metadata files so I'll select all of the frames with command A. And right-click and select metadata read metadata from files, and there you can see how adjusting the offset and rotation sliders in LR Timelapse affected the entire sequence. Now, I think this last frame is still a little bit too dark so let's make one last adjustment in LR Timelapse. I want it to be a little bit brighter at the end of the sequence, so I'll adjust the rotate slider again to level out the sequence a little bit more. I think that's good so I'll hit save and go ahead and go back to Lightroom. Just like before we can select all of our photos, right-click, select metadata read metadata from files, and I'll take a look at this last photo just to check. So all looks pretty good if. I scroll through all of these key frames, you can see that they're all marked with different amounts of stars. One star, two stars, three stars, two stars again, three stars and so on. The photos marked with one star indicate the start and the end of the sequence and the photos marked with two and three stars mark a point where we adjusted the exposure. LR Timelapse already tried to equalize these two in three-star exposures but we want to double-check each two and three star pair so they're matched as closely as possible. So if I select this first image with a two star rating and I compare it to its three-star pair, you can see that they're perfectly matched in exposure. I'll check the next pair and it looks like they're pretty good as well, and the third pair also looks pretty good. If I continue to check all of the key frame pairs, I'll eventually find a pair that isn't properly matched. In this case the three-star key frame is a little bit darker than its two-star pair. So I'll adjust the three-star key frames exposure by clicking on the exposure slider and using the plus and minus keys to increase or decrease the exposure until it matches the two-star key frame. I'll do the same thing for the next pair by adjusting the exposure of the three-star key frame to match the two-star key frame, and I'll just do the same process for all of the remaining key frame pairs just using the plus and minus keys on the keyboard to make small adjustments and exposure. All right, so I've reached the final key frame now, and I'm ready to save the small adjustments that I just made. So I'll select all of my key frames, right-click and select metadata, and this time save metadata to files. So, in the next video lesson, I'll show you how to make the final color adjustments to the sequence and then compile it into the final video. 15. Color Grading with Lightroom and LRTimelapse: Hey, everyone. Welcome back. In the last video lesson, we leveled our exposure in our Holy Grail sequence and smooth out all of the brightness jumps. In this video lesson, we will pick up where we left off and make our final color adjustments. So, an LRTimelapse under the Holy Grail Workflow tab, let's start by clicking the Create Other keyframes button. Then adjusting the number of keyframes that we want to use to define the changes in color across our Holy Grail sequence. You can see that this adds some green square markers on the graph preview, which indicates where on the sequence are keyframes will be. I think four keyframes is a good start for my example. So, once that's set, let's click the Save button and switch to Lightroom. Once we're in Lightroom, we should load the new metadata to all of our files. So, we'll want to disable any filters so that we can see every frame of our sequence. So, deselect the star rating from the filter bar and then I'm ready to select all of the files, right-click and select Metadata, Read Metadata from files. So, now you can see that I added four stars to the first frame, marking it as one of our keyframes. So, let's use the filter bar to view just our new keyframes. We can do this by selecting four stars in the filter bar. Another way of doing this is to use the filter presets on the thumbnail browser at the bottom of the window by selecting the dropdown and choosing LRT-HG with four stars. So, now we can see each of the four keyframes and we're ready to start editing. I'll select the first frame and open up the develop module. Now, when editing these keyframes, it's important to not adjust the exposure slider. Since we already leveled the exposure in the last video lesson, we'll want to make sure that we don't mess it up. So to start out, I'll tweak the contrast just a little bit, and I want to pull out a little more dynamic range from this image, so I'll pull down the highlights, and I'll also increase the shadows and reduce the whites just a little bit. Now, this flattened the image a little bit, so I'll bring back some contrast by increasing the clarity slider, and I'll boost the color by increasing the vibrance. Now, I think this frame might just be a little bit too bright. So, while we can't adjust the exposure slider, we can change the brightness of the image by adjusting the curves. So, I'll pull down the darks a little bit here. All right. I think that looks pretty good. Once we have our first keyframe edited, we're ready to copy the settings that we just made to the next keyframe. We can do this by pressing Command C or Control C and then making sure that all of the boxes are checked except exposure. We don't want to mess up the exposure leveling, so we need to make sure that we don't copy the exposure setting. Then, we can click Copy, and then select the next frame, and then press Command V or Control V to paste all the settings to the new keyframe. Once we've done that, we can make any changes we want, making sure to leave the exposure slider alone. I think it looks a little bit too contrasting, so decrease the contrast a little bit, and then brighten up the sky by increasing the highlights, and brighten the foreground by increasing the shadows. Finally, I'll tweak the tone curve and bring up the darks. Now, since this photo was just after sunset, I want to make it look a little bit cooler. So, I'll make my final adjustments to the white balance by bringing down the temperature and tweaking the tint to be a little more magenta. All right, I think that looks pretty good. So, I'll copy the settings once again with Command C, making sure that the exposure boxes unchecked. Then, click Copy, and then I can select the next keyframe and paste with Command V. I actually really like the look of this keyframe, so I'm going to leave the settings just as they are and move onto the next one. So, I'll copy the settings here again, making sure that the exposure is uncheckedm and then select the last keyframe and paste with Command V. Now, I think this is a little bit too dark, so I'll pull up the brightness a bit by adjusting the tone curve. It's also a little bit yellow from the color of the sodium vapor street lamps. So, I'll bring the white balance temperature down to neutralize some of that orange glow. That looks pretty good. So, now that we've adjusted all of our keyframes, we're ready to save our adjustments. So, I'll go back to the grid view by pressing G and then selecting all of the frames, right-clicking and choosing Metadata, Save Metadata to Files. Now, we can switch back to LRTimelapse and click Reload, and LRTimeLapse will load all of the adjustments that we just made including the final exposure tweaks that we made in the last video lesson. All we need to do then is tell LRTimeLapse to make the transitions between all of our keyframes. So, we'll press the Auto Transitions Special button and first, we'll select the Holy Grail Exposure button and choose Calculate Auto Transition for Specified Keyframe - Types. Then, finally, we'll select the All but HG button, and again, we can click the Calculate Auto Transition for a Specified Keyframe - Types, and that's it for all of our adjustments. Now we're ready to Save and return to Lightroom. So, once we're in Lightroom, we want to view all of the frames. So, I'll do this by selecting the filter preset of LRTimelapse full sequence. Then, we can load all of the new Metadata by selecting all of the frames and once again right-clicking and picking Metadata, Read Metadata from Files, and that will apply the new settings to the entire time-lapse sequence. So, now we're ready to export, so I'll select all of the frames and click Export, and then I can select the LRTimelapse present and make sure that the application is properly selected. An output folder on my desktop is selected and then I've given the LRTimelapse sequence a custom name. So, now we're ready to press Export. It'll take some time to export, but when it's finished, you can go to LRTimelapse and see the final video rendering dialogue. I'll be using the default settings of MP4 and 1080 P, and then I'm ready to click Render Video. When it's finally finished, we can open our file and see the final Holy Grail timelapse sequence. Be sure to upload your Holy Grail sequence to YouTube or Vimeo and share the link on your class project. 16. 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