Lessons

Lesson Info

Creating Timelapses: Importing Strategies

There's a couple of key things that, if you remember, it just gets fun after this, okay? Actually, it's fun to start with after, you know, all this rambling that I go on with. So I'm gonna just actually create a brand new... I have a sequence built, for those folks who may be downloading the files, I actually have imported the media. But we're gonna start from scratch, so I would go to the media browser, and let me open that up full screen. Let me go up here to our toy timelapse, which actually we saw earlier, and what I want to do is I want to import this. And this is where people, if you don't know the secret, and the secret is a click or a selection, you go crazy. They import using command-I, so first of all, not used to command-I, use the media browser. But they just select all the clips and you go import, and now you have a thousand still images inside of your bin, and you're going, "Okay, I'll put each one of these on the timeline at one second," and then you try to do stuff and ...

it just chokes. Way easier, if you know the secret. If you're in the media browser, you wanna change a setting under this dropdown window. You wanna say import as an image sequence. You want that checked. If, by the way, you are in the import dialogue. Just if you are, you know, stubborn, you can check down here, import as image sequence. So now, when I click, and you want to click on the very first numerically ordered image, because it will start building your clip from the one you select. So if you select one in the middle, you start from the middle. And it will go to the first break in numbers. And I just want to throw an aside in, I've had a situation where I had a bad frame, where it couldn't read one of my images when I recorded it. So I had a dead number. All I did was I took the frame before it, duplicated it, and renamed it with the missing number, because once you're in the time lapse, nobody's going to see that one-thirtieth or one-twenty fourth of a second is a repeat frame. And that way I could just do this (snaps) like that. So if you do get... and it happens, you're shooting a thousand images, sometimes you get one corrupt file, I just duplicate the previous or the subsequent one. Another reason I use that is there have been instances that in one frame or two frames, someone has walked in front of my camera. So in stead of creating it and then trying to fix it, I duplicate that frame, or if it's really mission critical, I could take both frames into Photoshop, merge them and clean up the person, and then save it as... You know. But that's getting a little more complex. But the point is, get numerical values, and you can always duplicate a frame. When I was saying I take it into Photoshop, those people who use Photoshop, you can take two photographs using the background of one and the foreground of the other and just erase the one person, without having to use content aware fill. So I right-click, and I say import. It's importing, I don't know how quickly you saw that come and go, but if I go back over here, this is now named. I had a checkbox that I need to turn off. Adobe Media Encoder just launched because of something I did. I think we're gonna close that window. Actually, I'm gonna tell you what I did. You know why? Because this will happen to you if you listen to the other lessons. When we did ingest, there is a checkbox that, when you ingest, it will automatically create the proxies, and that warning box said, "I don't create proxies for still pictures, I only create proxies for video." So that's why I got that warning box. If you get it, obviously you can just ignore it. But if it's annoying, go ahead and turn off that thing for show proxies, and you can see that at the very end of our section on importing, or in that lesson. So, let me go ahead, look at this as images, so there it is. It says the Jpeg of the very first clip. Guess what. It might say that, but if I look at that as a list, you can see that this is actually a movie of a 16 second duration. And if I double-click on that and load it into my source monitor and hit play, I already have a movie. It stitched them together, it did the work. If you hold down or click on import as an image sequence, it sees it as a clip. And now I can go ahead and I can start working with this. I want to point out, because I used the original footage, let's go ahead and look at this metadata which is always confusing to those who don't look at metadata all the time. And nobody should look at metadata all the time. There are things we should do with our lives. But I want to find the video info, there it is. And I'm gonna go ahead and stretch this out so you can see the whole thing. Bring that to the left, grab that to the right. So this is 5,400, by 36-whatever, okay? It's the same size as my original clip. This is huge, this is a huge video clip. I haven't brought it into my sequence yet. This is the original frame size, so I have a lot of leverage here. I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna make a sequence. Now we know we can make a sequence by dropping it in, and it makes a sequence, and a lot of scene photographers do this. And it works great, and you can export it out. This is a sequence that is way larger than ultrahigh definition. And it will probably not play back very well, and it'll be a huge file, and you'll have to shrink it anyway. So you really don't want to bring it in by making a new sequence. That's this huge, huge, giant size. And hit undo. I want to create a new sequence, command-N. I want to make this. And I'm gonna make this thirty frames a second. But that's not gonna lock me into controlling the speed of my time lapse, okay? I'm choosing this because I want this to by delivery method, or maybe I'm adding this to another show that's 30 frames. If you're doing everything in 24 and you're blending this with another footage in your program, I can make my sequence 24, 'cause you'll see what happens. So I'm gonna use the default that we've been using, we'll call it time lapse. We'll just call it time lapse. And now I'm gonna go ahead, and I should really rename this so that I know what I'm looking at. Drag the toy camera, there we go. We'll call that Toy. And now when I bring it into my sequence, it's gonna ask me, do I want to match the sequence? No. Keep my settings. Hit the backslash key, so I see the entire clip. Don't worry about this render, it is 16 seconds long. I'm gonna hit play, be patient after I hit play and I hit stop again. So it's working, I'm only seeing a very small part of this image, right? Because it's 6,000. What did we learn earlier, with stills as well as video? Right-click on it, sector frame size. Now it's scaled to fit. I have the black bars, because remember I didn't change it to 16 by nine, so with it selected, I simply go into my effects control panel, and I can sit there, and I can go scale that up until I see the edges, and now I can go ahead and hit play. And it's trying to load a lot of these frames at a time, and it's hard for it to do it. I'm gonna drop it to quarter resolution, see if that helps. So it actually is playing back smoother, just for me judge it, if I really needed to I could render this. We learned about rendering. The reason it's hard is it's basically playing back a movie that's 6,000 pixels wide. That's a pretty big movie. Even though we're seeing it this way, remember, it's loading 30 frames a second of still images, and based upon the speed of my computer and my harddrive, that's why it might have some stuttering. So if you get that, you can render, you can lower the resolution, just to see what it looks like to get a feel for the timing. So let's talk about timing first, and then we'll talk about movement. So I told you that it didn't matter what the frame rate that it thinks it was shooting, because I can change that. I brought it in, it assumed it was 30 frames a second, okay? That's actually a preference that you can change, that when you import image sequence, what you want it to relate to. I usually leave that the same 'cause I never remember what I did. So what I do is, if I want to change it, I go to this clip, now remember this clip really is every single one of my still images, and I right-click on it, and one of the things I can do is I can modify how Premiere interprets this footage or interprets this media. So I'm gonna go here to interpret footage, I get this dialogue box. And right now it's saying it's using a frame rate of 29.97. That's the 30 frames that we talked about. And for folks who are watching this, I know there's some questions, don't worry about the nuance difference between 29.97 and 30. It just was a counting methodology back in the day when we had interlaced video, and what happened is that when they went from black and white to color they needed to use some of the bandwidth, and instead of using... They had to drop a frame every so often, so that an hour show would be an hour. They technically don't throw away a frame, it's just a counting thing, so don't even think about it. But I know people have been writing in, going, "Well, which should I choose?" Either one. It's all gonna wash out in the end. Think of 29. as 30, think of 23.997 as 24. You're not going to broadcast, it's not an issue. It's just a counting, it's the way that you count the frames. You're not throwing anything away. So I'm gonna go ahead, I'm gonna say, instead of assuming it's one frame... 29 frames per second, I can go down here and I can say, "Oh, let's assume it's 24." Okay? And you'll notice when I do that that my duration will change. So here it went up from 16 to 20 seconds, because we're playing fewer frames per second. And keep everything else the same, don't mess with anything. And I hit okay, and I want you to see what happens when I bring that exact same clip, now that I've reinterpreted it, into my timeline. Remember, once a clip is in the sequence, it's not affected by changes you make to the same clip in your project file. Remember we learned that you can mark in and out points, drag it in, in and out points... It's the same thing. This is a new instance of the clip, and the old one was 16 seconds. This new one is 20, so when I drag it in, by default, it's going to be 20 seconds. It's playing the 24 frames per second and up converting it to 30. So it's actually playing it a little bit slower. So I'm controlling the playback speed, instead of stretching it or doing a speed change, I'm telling the computer, "Look at this time lapse using a different frame rate." I could do the same thing even slower. I could right-click and say, "You know what? "This is not a normal playback speed, but I could modify this and say play it at 12 frames a second." Conversely we know that we could go the other way, I could go 48. So I'm going 12. As soon as I hit tab, you'll see. For those who can't see, it's now 40 seconds, because I did from 30, to 24, to 12. I hit okay, and now when I bring this in, hit play, so... Things aren't moving as fast, but maybe that's the feel you want, maybe you want it to be longer. The takeaway from this is you can control very easily the speed of the events happening by telling it what frame rate you want, and we went to the minimal side, but maybe you want it to happen faster. You say, "You know something? Just assume it's 60 frames a second. Assume it's 70, or 80." You don't have to worry about, "Oh, I've gotta delete every third one and renumber it." I could still apply a speed change to it. If I put this in and it's like, "Okay, it's close, but I need to make it fit." I could go ahead and get the rate stretch tool, which we learned about, R, and I could, and if I zoom in, it's now readjusting the speed, because it sees it as a clip, okay? So there's two ways you can get to this, okay? So if you need to fine tune it you can, I just want you to be aware that these 900 images, or whatever, 480 images, once I bring them in as an image sequence, I can treat them as a video file, and every kind of edit that we do with a video clip, I can do with this clip. I can go ahead, and I can say, "You know what? I wanna do my color correction now." I go into the color layout, so we can open that up. We still have that old warning box there, don't need that. And because this is a clip I can work with, I can say, "You know what? I want to expand that, I want to go down here and maybe pull down my green, so I'm gonna go to my curves, I'm gonna grab green, and I'm gonna bring the green down a little bit, 'cause I want it more muted, and maybe I want to go up here and apply a stylistic look to it, so I go under creative, and I step through, and I say, "Okay, I want this..." I don't want black and white, but maybe I want something... There we go, that's kind of interesting. Select it, and now this should apply it. It might take a second. Come on, be good. Think. There we go. And I treat it just like a clip. You may find it's a little slower to respond, as it did, and I'm not a patient person. I'm switching this now from day for night. So now it looks like it's a dusk shot. It'll take a second, it's probably going through and doing this every single one, and there we have more of an evening shot. So everything you do with a clip, every kind of filter that you would apply, you can apply to this clip, 'cause it works as a single element. Let me go ahead and delete all of this, all of our hard work. I'm gonna go in, and I did the same thing, and this is the footage that I've already brought in, but they will be attached in the download files. This is just a nice little sunset in Prescott, Arizona. Once again, it's like, oh, I just take my camera and a tripod everywhere, even if it's a little camera and a little tripod, just because sometimes nature is amazing. Clouds are amazing, and that's why I like time lapses because you don't get to see clouds develop like that when you're watching it. So I'm gonna go ahead, I'm gonna throw this into our 1,920 by 1,080 timeline, I'm gonna drag and drop it. It'll probably give me the warning again. We want to keep our settings. And so now we have it, it's probably a little zoomed in. Now when I created this, I knew I wasn't gonna do a big move on it, and I downsized it to, I believe it was, about a width of 3,000, so there we go. It's this one, and I think there is my width. 2,000 by 133. So 1,920. So this is not gonna be much of a move. But it'll let me do a little one. If I threw it into, like, a 720... Here's something I actually do do. If I know that I'm not delivering it at a big resolution, maybe I just have a fun one and I want to put it out on Facebook, or put it up on Instagram or something, I may actually cut it in a sequence that's 1,280 by 720. 'Cause now I can still do a move on it, and when it's ultimately uploaded, it doesn't need to be that huge file for people to see. So remember, if we go way back to the beginning of the course, remember what your delivery format's gonna be, and that's how you choose your sequence. I know that I'm just throwing it up on the web, and so maybe I'll use a smaller image frame, and a smaller sequence setting, and still have the latitude to do the move. As a matter of fact, let's do that now that I've brought up that idea. Command-N to make new, we haven't made a different size. We're gonna go ahead and we're gonna go to the 720p. I'm gonna choose... Let's go with 24 frames a second, and I'm gonna hit okay. That's my new sequence, by the way next time I make a new sequence, it will remember my last sequence settings. So that could be a gotcha if you think you're making 1,920, you start cutting your show, it's like, oops. That's a problem. So I have that. Gonna go ahead, drag it in, hit the backslash after I say keep existing settings, and now I have a lot more space to work with, okay? And what I would do here is, I could do set to frame size, or I could just go right over to... We're gonna switch back to the editing layout. I clicked on editing up on top. And I'm gonna just go up to scale, and I'm gonna scale it down until I just start seeing my edges. So this the maximum size I want it to be. And now I can start moving around. If I wanted to, I could be zoomed in and pan across, because as long as this is 100% or less, it's sharp, okay? And that's the advantage of having a much higher pixel count for your still images than your video, okay? So remember we had the one that was 5,000? I could even do a lot more moves on it, okay? So right now it's at 60%, it's full screen, I could play this, this would be great. So I can make a decision now. I could start wide and push in or I could start close and do a pan. Because I have the resolution, so we'll do a couple of these.