in this video
I show you how to create time-lapse sequence from scratch
using your digital SLR camera and Photoshop
Adorama TV presents Take and Make great photography
with Gavin Hoey where you'll learn how to take stunning photos
and then polished them in post-production Hello
I'm Gavin Hoey and your watching Adorama TV brought to you by Adorama
the camera store has everything for us photographers
and today I'm back at the hotel shooting more photographs from the
22nd floor but this time I'm not actually gonna shoot one or two or three I'm gonna shoot
hundreds of pictures because I'm gonna make a time-lapse
sequence. What's a time lapse well it's just a series of
ordinary still images but they played together really really quickly
and create a video and it's incredibly straightforward to do
just needs a little bit of setting up now we're gonna play the
pictures back at 24 or possibly 25 or even 30 pictures
per seconds of frames per second
that means we're gonna need hundreds of pictures and they
all gonna be exactly the same but they need something moving through the scene
to make the time-lapse work out that could be moving clouds
haven't really got any of those today but fortunately I'm in New York so I've got moving
traffic
just down there. So to get this to work you need a few pieces of equipment
first most essential biggest bit of equipment your gonna need,
tripod okay so the tripod is vital because during the time lapse sequence
your camera must not move
at all and this could go on for
well this is gonna go on about 20 minutes but it could go on for hours
some time lapses go on for days or even longer
and during that time the camera has to be rock
solid steady so that's why we're using our tripod today
next you need a camera and you can do this with lots of different
cameras.I'm gonna do this on my Canon 60D
but if you got a camera have a look in the menu somewhere hidden in the menu
might be something called an intervalometer or maybe just
time-lapse if so great you're sorted
now I dont have wanna those, in the canon you don't get one of those
but what I do have is this little I O shutter cable that connects my camera
to my smart phone now this cable is really useful
it doesn't just do time-lapse there's a whole bunch of things that it can do
but for today were just gonna use the time lapse function
and it's gonna make my life so much easier now I know I want my shots to
happen five seconds apart
that's about enough time to see some movement
in the New York traffic baring in minds it's rush hour it's not removing that fast at
the moment
so five seconds means that over a minutes all take
12 pictures, over two minutes I take 24 pictures
if I play my time-lase back at 24 pictures per second
two minutes of the real world is compressed to 1
second of video and that should give just about the right movement
for this scene and it's a great easy place to start
if you're new to time lapse now on each time-lapse you want to take this even
further
do go and check out the time-lapse videos on the
Adorama Learning Center, Rich Harrington did a great series
really in-depth information is well worth a look
so let's talk about camera settings I want to be in manual for as much of this
shoot as I possibly can
so we'll start with the obvious stuff the obvious stuff means that I can
switch from
aperture-priority mode into manual mode
and that means I can take full control of the shots
now the shutter speed I'm gonna use is probably the most important bit of this
because I wanna shutter speed which blurs
the movement okay so it doesn't blur everything I just want the things that
are moving
to be very slightly blurry. Not so blurry that you can see them
but just a little bit of blur in the movement so I'm gonna go with the
shutter speed
thats fairly low down and then all I need to do is choose an
aperture that matches and then ISO that balances
everything up and once I've done that I'm kinda good to go with the settings
because every picture will have exactly the same exposure
now obviously if you're shooting a scene where the lighting is changing
you need a more dynamic approach to setting your
your camera up that's a bit more advanced for this tutorial
I'm shooting a scene where the lighting is gonna be exactly the same
for the next 20 minutes half an hour or so
okay so my shots framed my camera set everything's ready to go
I can start my time-lapse sequence going on my smartphone
and it's gonna take a picture every five seconds because that's how it's setup
but what I'm gonna do is photograph my hand so
wait for it, there you go. The first picture of my sequence is my hand
why have I done that well very simply
when you look at a great big list images it's hard to know where your time-lapse
starts and stops you may have taken some test pictures
and they might be out of sequence remember you need that that nice sequence a
pictures to get a flow of movement
so when you see a picture of your hand in the sequence you know
that's the beginning of your real time-lapse
another good tip is when you get to the end if you a time-lapse
wherever that might be put your hand in again for that last shot
and you can grab the two pictures in between
now because I'm gonna be doing this for 2 minutes of
real world becoming one second if I wanna time-lapse sequence that about 10
seconds long
that means I need to leave this running the twenty minutes
obviously if you want a longer time lapse leave the the camera
set up longer and he leaving it set up make sure you're somewhere secure
I mean I'm in my hotel here, I'm in my hotel room so
I don't think anything gonna happen here for the next 20 minutes but obviously if your doing this
outside then you can't walk off and leave your gear
another thing as well don't touch it
don't go anywhere near it walk away try to avoid any vibrations around your
tripod
anything that might ruin your sequence by having even the slightest movement
needs to be avoided at all costs so
I'm going go and get a muffin and a cup of tea, and we'll come back and we'll see how
the pictures
go through so join me in Photoshop in just a bit
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amazing prizes
well I had to wait a couple of hours but then the weather cleared up the Sun came
out and I got a great
time-lapse sequence now I shoot everything in raw including the time
lapse
so my first job was to get my images into Adobe Camera Raw or you could use
Lightroom
and make sure that they all had exactly the same white balance that's important
and any other changes were repeated on all images
then I saved all of my RAW files as jpegs
and we're ready to make our time lapse I'm gonna use Photoshop CC
although you could edit in Photoshop CS6 in exactly the same way
in fact it is incredibly simple to do
a time-lapse in Photoshop CS6 and CC
watch this. First thing we need to do is see something called the time line
now that's a sort of a video thing so if you can't see it by default
just change your workspace space to motion and you'll see the time line pop
up
then we need a blank document file new
but we don't want a photographic document we want a film and video
document
now if your not really familiar with film and video there are two that you're gonna be
interested in
HDTV 720 P or HDTV
1080 P I'm a gonna go with the 720 P because that matches my final requirement
and then I'll click ok. Next thing to do is to click on the
video time-line button, okay make sure it's not the animation time-line it does
have to be the video time-line
now remember we were talking about the 24 pictures
over two minutes well this is where that becomes really important
I'll click on this little option button here for a menu let's move it up so you'll
see what pops out
and from there I can choose to set the time line frame rate
by default it's 29.97
I'm gonna drop it down to 24 now that's an important step and one you
don't really want to miss
doesn't matter if you miss it out it'll simply mean your time lapse
will run either faster or slower so if timing is important
make sure that you do that step okay we'll click the
OK button and we'll move this down, and we're ready to
add in our still images all 240 of them
now to do it I simply go to layer and then I come down to
video layer and use new video layer
from file now these are all the jpegs that I saved out my raw files
and I'll click on the first one you'll notice that image sequence
is ticked and when I click open they'll
all come in as a video time-lapse
well there it is, don't believe me well hit the space bar or the play button
and that will play through as a time-lapse it
just works it's that simple now the trouble is of course
this is the wrong size there is, this is cropped it's not
not right it doesn't fit my blank video format
so what we do well if this was a photograph how would you make your
photographs smaller in Photoshop
yes you'd use Free Transform forget the fact that his video
it's still free transform its still
Photoshop so to make it smaller all I'm gonna go to is
edit and choose Free Transform a box will pop pop up saying this needs to be a
smart object
okay no problem convert that and there it is as my handles
shrink it in and it will fit beautifully in their. There we go
click on the tick. We can even go a little bit tighter there perfect
and that will resize my image now I got maximum amount of space
for my time lapse remember still images are much larger than video files
so they have the ability to crop in and crop out if you need to.
Now when you play it back the first time you will notice it runs really jerky
not very smooth but the second time and then after
it will play perfectly smoothly once is rendered into
Photoshops memory. So how do you get it out of photoshop well that's important
so here's how you do that
click on the little option menu option again
and choose to render the video now you can give this a name for your choice
on a location of your choice but the important thing
is the format H 264 is kinda the,
think of it was the jpeg version for video its
compatible with everything and it's the one to choose your preset is vital of
course remember we chose
720 P but also 24 frames a second
so make sure your export format match's what you're working with
all the way along otherwise again you're rate of play will be different
and when your done click on the render button and that will save your video
out onto your hard drive so there we go in just a few minutes we've gone from
240 still images
into a time-lapse sequence lasting 10 seconds
now if you wanna see more videos from me and the other great presenters
here on Adorama TV you know what you gotta do
you got a click on the subscribe button
I'm Gavin Hoey thanks for watching.
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