Lessons

Lesson Info

Creating Timelapses: Editing Images

I shot this with a preset actually on the camera for a toy camera, and toy camera basically does an extremely challenged depth of field, where this is out of focus and that, so it seems like you're looking at a model, and you can control where it is. But I didn't want to do that work. I wanted to get the post production, and literally shot shot after shot. If I do a get info on this, you can take a look that this was shot, this was shot with that little pocket camera, that little RX100, and it shot it at I think it's a 20 megapixel, maybe. Maybe 18. So this is fairly large, 5,000 by 3600. I'm putting it into 1920 by 1080. So I have a lot of flexibility, and so you can see my settings. You know, I, five, six, I didn't wanna really worry about you know, other than the artificial depth of field, I didn't wanna worry about the real depth of field. So it's always fun to look by the way at the XIF information when somebody posts something, 'cause then you can learn from it. As a matter of fa...

ct, I do that all the time when I'm looking at a shot that I really like. I'll do a, you can look at the XIF sometimes. That's the meta data, and you can say, oh look, they shot this at F eight, they shot this at 1.8. Oh, they kept the lens open for three seconds. They shot this at one thousandths of a second, 'cause it's a great learning option, you know, so, and also I often figure out what camera I use. So I just wanted to point out this was the size of the image and this is a JPEG and it begs the question what format should I shoot in and also what format or flavor should I bring into Premiere? So, the good thing about JPEG is that it's a relatively small file. So you're not gonna eat up a lot of disk space. This JPEG is, I'm guessing, maybe five megs. It's probably about one fifth or less of the, 2.7 megabytes. So it doesn't eat up a lot of space. It doesn't put a lot of demand on my system when I'm working in Premiere, yet I still have that huge resolution. The camera RAW version of this is much larger, okay? So the trade offs for those who haven't worked in both formats for the non, more experienced photographers out there, is I don't have as much control to maybe process this image if it's too dark or too light or what not, though you do have a lot of control still with the JPEG. You still can bring it into camera RAW and play with the dials. If I actually shot it RAW and there are instances where I know that you know it's a sunset or I really need to pull up shadows and highlights, huge dynamic range, I will process it in perhaps Light Room and then re-export those as JPEGS, because it's a lot easier to work with, and Premiere won't take a camera RAW file. It would take a TIFF. I could bring in a series of TIFFs, but as I said earlier, once it gets down to a television or a computer, you know, you're not gonna see that nuance of difference if the original image is nice and sharp. So I tend to work with JPEGs in Premiere. I make the decision based upon the camera and the environment and my patience, if I'm gonna shoot JPEG or RAW, or for some of you, your cameras can actually shoot both a JPEG and RAW at the same time, and I'll do that, and if the JPEG does what I need, then I don't have to worry about processing the RAW, okay? So, you know, I have some flexibility. So that's my thinking when I shoot. The other thing I try to decide before I bring it in is do I need the full resolution, that 5,600? Or am I gonna do a big move on it, or maybe a small move, or no move at all? Because if I'm bringing it into say Light Room to prepare it for Premiere you know I'll make some of those decisions and I may export it as a smaller image, or I may already crop it to the proper aspect ratio so it's just drag and drop, and that's what we're gonna do. So, that's my thought process when I go through and I work with these. So I have all these images. I think I threw a bunch, and so in this case I shot 480 images, and I haven't had to decide yet what my frame rate is or what the speed is, okay? You know, maybe in my mind I had an idea. So if I put it in at 30 frames a second, okay, it's simply the math of 30 into that. It's probably, what, about 12, 15 seconds-- 450 would be 15 seconds, 16 seconds long. If I do it at 24 frames a second it would be a 20 second. I could do it even slower, or I could do it faster depending on, you know, what I shoot. But it's things to keep in mind. So this was 480, and you know, depending on how frequently I clicked it, I think this was every few seconds, it maybe was an hour's worth of shooting. Let's go ahead and I wanna launch Light Room and you can also do what I'm about to do in Photoshop. There, it's really whatever you're the most comfortable with. In this case, this is some Niagara Falls footage and let me go ahead and reset this back to my window defaults. You think I would have set this to defaults before, and my brains is sitting here in the world of Premiere, so now I have to remember to open up windows. There we go. So, I shot this, we actually have seen this I think maybe in one of the samples, and we actually color corrected this because I did a version where I just did the time lapse without any color correction, but what I might do is I might say, you know what? I'm gonna bring all these images, all the images into Light Room. In Photoshop I could do the same thing and then create an action to repeat, you know, the, the developing that I'm gonna do, and I would develop it here before I bring it in and then export them out either if they were camera RAW as JPEGs, or if they were still JPEGs I would just keep them as JPEGs. So I may go in here and say, you know, what's wrong with the picture, and we work with our histogram. So I could go in and maybe I'll try do a, a quick exposure. So I'll say okay how, my blacks, I'm holding down the option key or the alt key. I bring the slider down. That's where I can see my blacks are getting crushed. Bring that up. I'm revealing my whites. So now I've expanded the dynamic range. I wanna grab my shadows. Open up the shadows a little bit. Highlights, I think maybe I'll even open up the shot a little bit. Okay, there we go. I wanna do a color balance. I can either do an auto and see if it does it, which it doesn't. So I'll undo that. I'll say what should be white will go here, and now we have a more balanced shot, and I could go through with contrast and what not. One of the things you can do in Light Room is down here you can copy and paste effects but there's also the option that you can switch instead of just doing the previous one. Let's see if I can aim this just right. Let's switch this, here we go. If I remember the modifier for that-- Oh, let me go back to, I know why I can't do it, 'cause I'm not in my library. So, oh and I did, that was great. I picked one right from the middle. Gotta love that F, and F again. Ah, G, the group, there we go. Gotta remember the keyboard shortcuts. Develop. Blanking on this but I, which is funny, because I use Light Room all the time, and anybody in the crew or in the studio audience who uses Light Room can call this out. I can set it so when I change one it changes all of them afterwards. Select them all, go to develop, select them all again, go G for group, select them all. That should let me do it. Auto sync, there we go. It's this little switch, sync and auto sync. So auto sync says you fix the first one and all the parameters go to all of them, and then if I want to use this whole image I could then you know export them as a batch and when I export them I can choose to rescale them, okay? So, when I go to, in export, one of the options I have is do I wanna scale this down, and so I might change the size to a new physical size, and put a, you know, and don't worry about resolution. Remember, television. You don't need computers. It's gonna be 70 DPI no matter what. So if I wanted to be exactly a certain size, maybe 50%, I could go ahead and just do it by a percentage. The other thing I might do before I bring it out is I may go ahead and put a crop on it. So I may say you know what? I wanna crop this, and the nice thing about the cropping tool is that when you choose that you can switch it from the original to say a 16 by nine so that now whenever I crop it it's gonna fit exactly in my frame without me having to worry about anything. Now, I crop with two things in mind. Sometimes I'll throw the crop on but not necessarily scale it down, because now when I throw it into Premiere it fits perfectly. So if I need to do one of those set image to frame size it'll pop in. I won't have to worry about any black around the edges and now I can still have the resolution to do a move or a zoom on it. So maybe I just wanna do a push or a pull. So here I just wanna get that 16 by nine aspect ratio from my wide shot and then position it so it's ready to drag and drop in. If I know that I just want to use a smaller section that 16 by nine crop, well, look how quickly it's just syncing it across all of my clips, and I could reposition that anywhere I want. So maybe I just wanna start there and push in tighter. So, I would use Light Room if I wanted to and this is not required. So if you're watching this, and you go, I don't wanna learn a new app, you can do a lot of stuff directly in Premiere, but if you have the photography background and are used to Light Room, or wanna learn it, there's a lot of things that you can prepare so you don't have to do the extra work in Premiere. I can do all of this or most of this in Premiere as I see fit. The nice thing is by the way if this was a camera RAW image I would just have that much more latitude to bring in detail in the clouds, and make sure I have a lot of detail in my shadow and what not. It just gives you a lot more, a lot more data to work with. So I would export that. The other thing that is very important when you export are when you shoot before you can bring it in it is critical, it is critical that all of your still images are in consecutive numerical order without any numbers missing to make your life easier. If you have a number missing, Premiere will not be happy. It literally grabs it from beginning to end and if it has a missing number it will stop halfway through with that missing number, okay? So most of the time you can go with the conventional naming from the camera. It's gonna numerically do it. It doesn't have to start with one, you know. It can start, in this case, with 309, as long a 310 is the next one and so forth. But if you are trying to fix something or put something out you can of course renumerate it. I don't know if that's a word. It is now. You can numerate it maybe I guess the first time, and then renumerate it later. So you can go ahead and you can name it. Sometimes I do it just because I wanna add the scene's name to the numbers. It's like, Niagara Falls, blah, blah, blah. Okay, so those are the things I tend to like to do. If it wasn't already a JPEG, one of the options is to say make it a JPEG, okay? So your file settings. I also try to keep the quality up if I do go to a JPEG. There is a point of diminishing returns by bringing it up 100 for uncompressed, but an uncompressed, completely uncompressed JPEG is still gonna be way smaller than a TIFF or a you know PNG file, and then you can leave it. The default is S, SRGB. There's different schools of thought, so I'm not even gonna go down this road because everybody, they'll be-- There's four options, so they'll be five answers to that that people will write in. Usually it's SRGB or Adobe RGB depending on the, the photographer. And there we go, and if I wanted to make it exactly 1920 by 1080 once I cropped it, this would be my option to do that, you know. I would just type in 1920, and 1080. I've already cropped it to that size. So that way I won't get any distortion and now it's a one to one and this is if I didn't want to do any kind of zoom. It's just ready to drop in and go. All this pre work will make the actual creation of your time lapse that much easier and that much faster and then I would hit export. I'm gonna hit cancel right now. As a matter of fact, on my machine once I have all these settings, I have actually a few different ones I save them as presets for literally my time lapses, you know, 'cause I know. Okay, that's really the Light Room part of this Premiere course. You can do of course this is in any editing, photo editing program if you need to.