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Lesson Info

Advanced Timelapse Editing

(calm music) Let's go over an advanced time-lapse editing technique. Now for this technique, we're gonna edit time lapses where settings were changed during the time lapse. So if you watch that time lapse without making any changes, it's just gonna step through different levels of exposure. And that can look like the image is flickering, which we don't want. So we're gonna try and smooth that out, and we're gonna use a program called LRTimelapse. Now, we're gonna go into our project and find the time lapse. So we're going all the way over here to this time lapse that was taken on November 27th in 2018. We were using a Cannon 5D IV. We captured a tunnel view. There are rain clouds in the shot, and it's shot with 16 to 35. So this one has a ton of images in it, 431, and it goes from day to night. So we're gonna bring this into LRTimelapse. We're gonna open up LRTimelapse 5, and we're gonna find that time lapse and import it into LRTimelapse by using this left panel right here. Now, you...

can see it's already brought up the time lapse right here that we were talking about. So we can click on it, and we can start to initialize all the metadata. So you see right here, here's a time lapse that we were talking about earlier. You can click on that, and when you click on it, you can see that it's gonna start loading all the information from each of the photos in the time-lapse sequence. Once you've got it loaded, you can see that here are all the images, and here is the luminance calculation that LRTimelapse is providing, and that's just showing you how the light changes throughout the shot. You can see the interval. You can see aperture, shutter speed, ISO. So the interval changes throughout the shot. Aperture stays the same. The shutter speed changes, and the ISO changes. So all of these changes make it difficult for us to render out the time lapse using our basic techniques. So we're gonna use LRTimelapse, and we're gonna follow this process that they have laid out for us. You can see that there are arrows pointing to each step of the process. And for this first process, we're going to use the keyframe wizard. So before we do that, let's just watch the video. And we can see it keeps blinking, and that's because the exposure keeps getting changed to factor in the loss of light as sun sets. And it gets really dark towards the end of the shot, so we might not end up using a lot of the end of the time lapse. Let's how much we can bring out. You can also see here is how bright it is towards the beginning and how the brightness drops off, and you lose a lot of exposure towards the end of the shot. So let's use the keyframe wizard. The keyframe wizard is going to automatically put in these blue circles, or the keyframe wizard is gonna automatically put in these blue diamonds and these orange arrows. So a blue diamond means that that is a keyframe. So that is an individual frame that we're going to edit in Lightroom. And then these orange arrows are indicating that this is where a change happened in the setting. So you can see if I click on these first three arrows, we go from one over 80, to one over 60, to one over 50. And so if we step through that, there's an exposure change there, and there's an exposure change there. So the arrow pointing in from the left is indicating that these are two images at the beginning of the change. And then the arrow pointing in from the right is indicating that's the end of the change in exposure. So you'll see that throughout. Here, there's two, again. Here, there's three. And here's a blue dot right before it. We might wanna move our keyframes around, and so we're gonna end up using the slider right here. And as I do this, you can see on this line over here, that's our entire timeline for the time lapse. We have one at the beginning. We have one at the end. And then we have three in the middle. And so we're gonna think about where we want our keyframes to be. We wanna kind of edit where there are changes in the exposure so we can create a look for the time lapse as it changes light throughout the time lapse. So you see, as I scrub through, it's pretty bright at this point, and then it starts to lose brightness, and then it's dark. So I think where we have the keyframes currently is good, and that will allow us to set the exposure for this beginning portion, the middle portion, and the end. Though, I'm going to go to the middle keyframe, and I'm gonna click on that, just left-click. I'm gonna remove it. And I'm just going to set it somewhere more in the middle. I can hit one on the keyboard, and that will put another keyframe in. So that will just allow us to set a more medium keyframe between bright and dark portions of the time lapse. Now that we've got the keyframes set, we're just gonna move on to the next step. That's called the Holy Grail Wizard. And the Holy Grail is just describing a technique of time lapse where you change the settings over time and then use this program to smooth out the time lapse so it looks good in the end. So when we run the Holy Grail Wizard, we can see that it's equalized the exposure between all of the steps and exposure throughout the time lapse. So that means all of the arrows pointing in and out have been equalized. So it will look like there is no change in exposure in the end of our time lapse. So now that we've done that, we can adjust these sliders right here. Now, if you rotate, or if you stretch your timeline, it'll just adjust the luminance of all your frames so that if you go like this, it'll darken the end, and it'll brighten the beginning. And if you rotate it this way, it'll bring it more to center. So we're gonna do that, and that's not gonna lock any settings in. We can change these settings later. We can stretch it to bring it in closer, and that way we can keep it closer to the middle of the line, which is where we wanna be with our exposure most of the time. We're gonna save these settings, and by doing that, it's gonna save everything to the metadata on our image files in the time lapse. So we're done with that. We're gonna open up Lightroom now. Now that we've opened up Lightroom, let's start a new catalog. Let's navigate to our project folder. And let's save it in a new folder called Lightroom. Go into Lightroom. Just type in the name of the project, and that will be our Lightroom catalog. So that will open up a new Lightroom catalog. Once we've got that opened, we're gonna go back into LRTimelapse, and we're gonna drag this time lapse. You can see the plus sign right there. That indicates that you can import all those images. If you import, remember to add so it keeps the location in your file system. We're gonna wait for all those time lapses to import. Or we're gonna wait for all those photos to import. Okay, so we're done importing our time lapse. Now we're going to sort by rated. So there's quite a few keyframes in here. We're going to sort by four stars. So four stars are the keyframes that we'll be adjusting for our time lapse. And we're gonna start with the first one, and then we're gonna work our way through all five of these. So let's start by moving to develop mode. Let's do some simple edits. We just wanna make sure that we get a good-looking exposure, but we're not looking to do some extensive coloring on this shot because we're going to do color later on in our project. And we wanna have as much information as possible. So we're gonna start by sliding our exposure just down a little bit, get some more detail in the sky. And we're gonna bring back some of those blacks and bring down the whites just a little bit. We just wanna have a good-looking histogram. And anything else that you might wanna do, you can make small adjustments by grabbing shadows. You can move your highlights around. And then also the white balance is a little bit off, so I'm gonna slide that around to see. It feels like El Cap, the rock, just looks a little bit too blue. It's too cold-looking. Let's start by just going to 5, and just comparing that to how it was shot. Just go back and forth. Just a little bit warm, so let's bring it back to there. Just keep doing before and after. Make sure it looks good to the eye. Try to remember what the shot looked like when you were there. And I think that we've got the shot where we want. We're gonna apply this to all the other images. So we're gonna select that first image and then hover over the last image in our keyframe sequence. We're gonna hold shift, left-click so we select all images from the order of first to last. We're gonna come up to here, and with LRTimelapse installed, there's a plugin that installs with it in Lightroom. And so if you come up to this icon right here just to the right of the help menu bar item, you'll see that there's an LRTimelapse-sync-keyframes button. We're gonna click that, and that will apply the settings to all the proceeding images in our sequence here. So now we're gonna look at the next shot, and it looks kind of dark. Using those settings from the previous keyframe, we're going to take the exposure and just bring it back till it looks kind of good. We can go back and forth using the arrow keys to just compare the two images. Just make sure that we're not trying to brighten up too much. You wanna make sure it still looks like it's fading to nighttime, and we're not trying to pull out too much detail. And so we're looking at the clouds. The clouds are looking pretty good still. I feel like I still have the same amount of depth in the clouds as I did in the first shot. And the trees still look pretty good. At this point, we still had a lot of light in our time lapse. So we're gonna use those settings. So I'm just gonna adjust exposure. We're gonna keep it really simple so everything works really well in LRTimelapse. The more settings that you adjust between each of the keyframes in your image sequence will make it more difficult for LRTimelapse to work. And so before adjusting anything like levels or hue, split toning, sharpening, make sure that all of those settings are applied to all images in your image sequence. And definitely check with LRTimelapse's manual to see what settings are supported and not supported in Lightroom. So we're gonna just use this window right here and white balance to adjust to all these, to ensure that we get a good looking image. So now that we've done that second keyframe, we're gonna apply again use sync keyframes to all future keyframes, to all future keyframes. We're gonna look at the third keyframe here. It's starting to get kind of dark. You see a lot of noise in the sky. The end of the shot might be kind of noisy, so it's a personal preference as to whether or not you see noise, but we're gonna try and get as much detail, as little amount of noise as possible. So, I think, Let's see what happens when we go brighter. We're gonna go back just a tad bit in the blacks. We're not gonna adjust the shadows too much. And maybe just that light in the middle of the frame by adjusting whites, we'll be able to bring that out just a little bit more. But we don't wanna push the colors too hard. So I don't think we're gonna be doing too much to the time lapse after this. We're gonna sync the keyframes again. We're gonna look at this one. It's looking kind of nasty. Maybe just a little bit brighter in the middle there. Maybe we can use that later and crop in our image to get a better shot. We just synced for the last frame, and it is looking mighty noisy. So let's render this whole thing out. We're done with all the keyframes from one through five, but before we go back to LRTimelapse, we have to save the metadata. Any of the changes that we made here, we have to save into the metadata by right-clicking, selecting all the keyframes first. Right-click and navigate to metadata. Save metadata to files. Make sure you say save and not read. Save the metadata. Go back to LRTimelapse, and we're gonna load all of those changes. So you see that you have one, two, three, four, five keyframes, and you can see how the exposure changed based on the edits I did between each one. So it kind of gradually goes up, down a little bit, and then up just a little bit. And that will be be reflected when those changes are applied to all the images in the time-lapse sequence. So we've just loaded our keyframes back in. We're gonna create a transition between them so you can see sort of a curve. Okay, and that line right here, this yellow line, that represents the changes that are gonna be applied to all the images in the time-lapse sequence. So ideally, that's what it will look like if you viewed the exposure change over time. And we're going to now move on to the next step. Since we've done auto transition, we're gonna move to visual previews. This part will take a little bit of time. Good time for a break. So let's just watch it go and grab a cup of tea, come back, and see what we got. All right, so now we're done with our visual preview, and this is the moment of truth. We're just gonna hit play right here and see what we got. So far, I don't see any blinking or flickering in the shot. The only thing you see is just that light's coming in from the cars that were driving by the camera. So, that's good. That looks really good. And this is what I'm talking about with day-to-nighttime lapses. You have no idea what you're getting until you get to this point, and it can be really hard to finish this time lapse, to actually render it out and do all the work that needs to be done to get a smooth-looking time lapse. And if there were just no cars in Yosemite driving around and flashing our camera, then we would have a pretty smooth-looking shot. And just a little bit more light towards the end would've helped us, but we can take that into our next shot and just learn from that and make adjustments later. So we're just gonna take a more detailed look at this before we call it good. We're gonna use the arrow keys and just jump through the frames, just confirm that everything is smooth as it looks. Because it plays really quickly, you might not catch things. So we're gonna go through a few of these exposure bumps where the orange arrows are. We don't have any problems there. We're gonna go up here further along. Let's drag this over here where it drops exposure pretty dramatically. We're gonna go from frame 124 to 130. And a little bit of change there, but it's playing so quickly. At 24 frames per second, you won't notice that. And I think that these are all looking pretty good. So we're gonna bring this image sequence into After Effects now and render out our shot just the way we did before. And when we're done with that, we're gonna give it another preview and just make sure that there's nothing else that needs to be done to the shot to make it look perfect. If there is flicker in your shot, there is one more step in LRTimelapse that I did not go over, and that's visual deflicker. And when you hit that, we're not actually gonna use it, but we're gonna click on it for example. And in here, you have a smoothing scale, and if you just look at the green line, that gives you a visual of no smoothing to maximum smoothing. So because all of these jumps in exposure are due to, not to the camera but because of the cars driving by, there's no way we can smooth that out. So, let's ignore that. But if there was parts of your time lapse where you saw more wavering than exposure, where it's jumping around in places where there was no cars or no headlamps in the shot, then I would use that tool to smooth out the flicker. So that is the Holy Grail method, and that is definitely a reliable way to smooth out your day-to-night time lapses. (calm music)