Lessons

Lesson Info

Basic Timelapse Editing

(suspense music) All right now, let's look at the time lapse we just imported and go through the basic steps for rendering out of time lapse. This time lapse doesn't have any advanced settings, so we're gonna go through some simple steps. First we're gonna start with after effects. So we're gonna open up after effects. Doesn't matter if you have 2019 or 2014, any version after effects will do. And so we're gonna import that image sequence that we just renamed into after effects, once we blow it up. Okay, we're gonna start a new project, and we are going to start by importing the whole image sequence. So we're gonna go to our external drive where we've copied our files to, navigate to that one time lapse. It may seem a little excessive to have this many levels in your project. Feel free to simplify it if you need to, so you don't have to click around so much, but as you expand your project, you may find it useful. Just wanna remind you of that. That that's a flexible thing, whatever w...

orks for you. So now we've got the time lapse and we have the first image in that image sequence. We wanna click on the first image of that image sequence and make sure that we have Camera Raw sequence selected. Hit okay, and this is where we can do any adjustments to this time lapse, if we wanna increase the exposure. So that those settings that we do in Camera Raw are applied to all other images and image sequence but it will apply the same settings to the entire image sequence. So just be aware of that, as we can just increase it a little bit. It's a little dark towards the beginning and we know that towards the end of our time lapse it gets a little bit dark as well, and so just taking that slider right there will bring out some more exposure. We can also come up here and grab onto the blacks. We can come over to here on the right grab onto the whites and we can watch the histogram slide to wherever we think it's necessary so that it's not clipping on the blacks or blowing out the highlights. Okay, so I'm gonna use those settings right there. I'm not gonna do any advanced coloring to this because I just wanna create a very simple looking image that will work well for our coloring process later on. We're not gonna go over color in this workshop but if you're doing a time lapse project you wanna make sure that you provide a simple flat looking image for whoever is coloring your project or if you're coloring your project, you wanna have a very simple looking image with as much information as possible so that you can make this time lapse look like the other clips in your project. So you wanna have that flexibility. I'm gonna hit okay. And right over here, if we expand the view for all the information about this time lapse, we see that this symbol right here indicates it's an image sequence. We have the file name with an underscore where there should be a number for the image sequence. It's gonna give us some brackets zero through 337. That's just indicating that this image sequence goes from one to 337. Now, if it says two through 337, that's fine, as long as it's an image sequence and it doesn't skip around in numbers. And then we have the duration is 337 frames, frame rate. We have this import to because that is the frame rate that we're using for the workshop, and so we're gonna match that frame rate. I know I said 24 earlier. So if you are working with 24 or as long as there's no audio involved, it's okay to conform those to each other. We have a size for our file image sequence and the type of file is Camera Raw. So let's just explain that all. We wanna make a composition now, so we're gonna drag this image sequence down here and that's just a new composition button. And if we drag that image sequence over the button it's gonna create a new composition and that composition can have any number of layers in it. The only layer that's in it right now is the image sequence, and that's because we drag the image sequence into that button, and so that's what we want. The good thing about dragging your image sequence into the Camera Raw icon, instead of creating a new composition by doing that, is when you do that it has a number down here that will maybe not match the number of frames in your image sequence. So you hand the image sequence into the new composition button, it creates a composition to the exact length of your image sequence. So that's important. So you don't accidentally cut off your time lapse. Now we're gonna click on this which is our image sequence, double click that. Now down here, we have the image sequence showing. This composition was created in the same resolution as the images in our time lapse, which is a little bit higher than what we want. We're gonna wanna render these out in 1080p. So we're gonna click on the composition settings and we're gonna see that the resolution for our composition is 4320 by 2880, and that's a aspect ratio of three by two. So we're gonna click this button and that's gonna allow us to unlock the aspect ratio so we can choose any aspect ratio we want. So we're gonna set the aspect ratio to 1920 by 1080, and when you do that, you see that the ratio is now 16 by nine, and that's gonna be the ratio that we're gonna use on our final project. So that's gonna work for us. We see down here some other settings, always wanna have square pixels, 23976 for this project, resolution full, and that goes from zero to 337 frames. We're gonna hit okay. So we see right here that the frame is showing only a small portion of our image and that's because the composition is a lot smaller than the time lapse sequence. And so we're gonna scale the time lapse sequence down, and so we can go down here and do that but we're not going to use this slider to do that 'cause it's a little bit tedious to slide that in and out to trying to find the right framing. So instead I'm gonna go back to and I'm gonna right click on the composition in our preview and I'm gonna drag the mouse up to transform fit to comp with. And so that makes it, so we have a little bit on the top and a little bit on the bottom, that's because the time lapse sequence is three by two and our composition is 16 by nine. So we can choose to move our image up or down, whatever looks best. So we're gonna click on fit. So that way we can now see it with a lot more detail, maybe give our window a little bit more size. And then down here, right in the composition, on our layer for the image sequence, we're going to click on position, and so we have our X and our Y. And so our Y is right now at 540, we're going to slide that up and down and by grabbing our Y and sliding around, it allows our image to stay in its current X position, and that's important because we don't wanna cut our frame off in any way and have a black line on the side because we didn't notice it by dragging our image around. So if we grab our Y we can slide it up and down and we have the option of having more trees or more waterfall, but I kind of like how when we have more trees and with the waterfall still a bit centered, it looks a little bit darker and more interesting to the eye. It's a little bit... I think the image is nicer when it's dark just based on the way we composed it. So if we have more light then it might be a little bit harder to accomplish that. But I do like in the top how we see the waterfall coming down here. You can see where the water is coming from and it's just not dropping off from this lip right here. So I'm going to just leave that little top portion, so you can see that pathway. So now we've got our image sequence dropped into a composition and frame properly, and the next thing we have to do is set up a render and render out this time lapse so that we can preview it and see if it looks right. Okay, to render out our time lapse, we're gonna go down to our image sequence in the composition and select that. And by selecting that it allows us to come up to the composition menu item and select add to render queue, and notice that here you have a shortcut. So that makes it a little bit quicker. And you can click on, add to render queue which will add it to the render queue and after effects. So you can render it out here if you want to. And that will give you most render settings that you'll need for your project, but we're gonna actually go back to our composition and add to Adobe media encoder queue. And so that will send it to another program that will compile our time lapse using a little bit more advanced settings and give us more options for different types of compression. Okay, so our composition is now queued up in media encoder. You can see that the program is coming from is after effects and you can see the name of our composition right here. So we're going to click on where it says, H264, we're gonna click on that and it's gonna open up the render settings. We're gonna go over two different types of render methods. So we have H264 selected right here by default but we wanna render this out so that we have the lowest amount of compression possible to work with in a future project. This is important so that if you're sending it to a client or if you're exporting it, or if you're rendering it for editing in premier or another video editor, you can have as much detail to work with as possible. So we're gonna select QuickTime. We're gonna uncheck export audio 'cause there's no audio, and we're going to come down to video Kodak. We're gonna select Apple ProRes 422 HQ. Now that will be the lowest amount compression that you can get using ProRes. And there are other ones here 422, 422 LT, 422 proxy, and 4444. So for your own project I would use 422 HQ to get the lowest compression. Now we have the settings don't quite match our 1080p resolution that we had in our composition, so we're gonna hit match source. You can see now it's locked into that resolution that we had before. The frame rate field order is progressive, aspect is square pixels. Okay, so everything looks good. We're gonna use those settings for a render. We're gonna hit use maximum render quality. And the last thing we're gonna do, is we're gonna set the output name. So it's already using the correct output name since our composition is the same name as our time lapse folder that we imported it from, which is gonna help us speed this up. We're gonna navigate to our project's folder and to our project in the year 2018 winter annual summit. So we're back in the time lapse folder, where we see a one raw, and that's where we are gonna leave all of our raw time lapse image sequences. Now we're gonna create a new folder next to that. It's gonna house all of our ProRes files. So we're gonna hit 02 ProRes and we can put 422 HQ in there just to specify the type of ProRes. Okay, so let's double check the save as file name that we have for media encoder. That looks good. We're gonna hit save. So now it's gonna render to that folder with that name. Hit okay. So right now it says QuickTime, we're using custom Kodak. So right here, we see it says QuickTime custom because we use custom settings and we have our output location which we're not gonna change. We've already set that. We're gonna... It says ready. So we're gonna hit start queue, and that's gonna render out anything that's currently in our queue. While this is going, you can do that process with other time lapses and add more to your queue and use those same settings, and you can keep rendering out more and more time lapses as this time lapse is rendering at the same time. So next we're just gonna wait for that time lapse to render. We're gonna preview it, just make sure it looks good and make any adjustments that need to be made and re-render if necessary. Okay, we just finished our time lapse, so let's navigate to where we rendered that time lapse and preview it. Okay, we clicked on that link and it brought us right to the video. We can hit space bar, right away, we see a little bit of jitteriness, seems to be shaky, and towards the end, it gets pretty dark. We're not gonna play with that because if we try to bring any more detail in that darker area, it just won't look very good. So we're gonna leave it as is, and at the very least we have about seven or eight seconds of a pretty good time lapse. So let's bring this back in the after effects. Let's navigate to after effects, and now we have our composition back up again. So over here, I'm gonna just close this window, you can see that you have all these tools over here on the right hand side. And by default, you'll see them here, and after effects. if you expand effects and presets, you can type in warp stabilize, and you'll see Warp Stabilizer VFX. You can click and drag that. So here I'm clicking and dragging it over to my composition and I'm gonna apply it to the layer that I want to use warp stabilizer on. And then it brings up in the effects controls panel, all the effects that we have applied to that layer. So right now warp stabilizer is the only effect we have on it. If we have an effect below it, then it will show up right below it, right there. So you can see that this is gonna take some time. It's warp stabilizing each frame of the time lapse and so it's gonna take an estimate of 10 minutes. Let's wait to see what it says and it comes back up, says six minutes. So we're gonna warp stabilize that and we'll come back to it and preview it when we're done. Okay, now that warp stabilizer is done warp stabilizing, we're just gonna make sure that it did its job correctly. There's a lot of settings in warp stabilizer that you can adjust if things don't work out with warp stabilizer, but let's just see if a default settings worked in this scenario. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna go back into media encoder because we have that link to where the file is, that we rendered at previously that looked a little shaky. We're gonna click on that, and instead of previewing it by hitting space bar or loading it in QuickTime, whatever media player you're using, you'll notice that, that doesn't give you the exact frame number where the shaking is happening. So what I use is QuickTime 7, it's an older player, but you'll notice if you come down into the bottom left corner of the window in that interface, it says you can look at the standard view for time code non drop frame, or frame number. Frame number is what you wanna find. And when you watch your video, you can see that the frame number keeps going up because we're progressing through the time lapse frame by frame. So we're gonna look for some shakiness in the shot. So we're gonna scrub through. Okay, you see how right there, it looks like there's a little bit of shaking that we don't want in the shot. We're gonna find that exact frame, and we're gonna do that by using the arrow keys on our keyboard. So we're gonna scrub through and... Okay, I found it, 83 to 84. You see that, that just... That's too much shaking for what we're looking for and I think that warp stabilizer can remove that. So let's see if it... Since we have already warp stabilized, all the frames, let's go back into after effects and find frame, 83, 84, and do a preview of the frames, 83, and maybe 10 frames on each end before and after that, just so that we can watch it and see for ourselves in a preview, if it looks good. So we're gonna go back into after effects and we're gonna find frame number 83. So I've already done a RAM preview right here for 80, 78 through 90. So that would be enough to see if the shaking is gone. Now, in order to see the frame number on the left side here, you can hold down command on a Mac and left click on it, and it will shift between showing you the time code and the frame number. So we wanna have frame number and we wanna use the arrow keys plus command to navigate through that timeline. If we hit the arrow keys only it'll shift the position of the whole composition over. So we don't wanna do that. We wanna hold command and then free by frame. Between 83 and 84, do you see any shaking? Might be a little bit blurrier on because something might have moved the camera and caused that blurriness. So we can't remove that, but that's such a minor detail that you probably won't notice when watching this, that the shaking is the only thing that we wanna remove. And so we are successful in doing that, and I think if we just do a preview by hitting space bar and letting the computer preview using the RAM in your computer, those individual frames then we can watch, and now it's previewing more frames. So we can let that render out some more frames to preview but we really only need the preview just what we saw. Let's watch it again. Are you ready? 3, 2, 1. Okay, so I think that's good to go. And if you feel like any other portions of your time lapse are still shaky, then you can use that same technique to find the shakiness, remove it and also if you need to adjust your warp stabilizer settings you can come up to here in your effects panel and you can make adjustments there. Now that we've fixed that let's render off a new time lapse and let's preview it when it's done. (suspense music)