(dramatic electronic music)
- Time.
Where does it come from?
Where does it go?
How is a man in a police box able to travel through it?
Regardless, for us mere humans, it's always moving forward.
Unless you know something that I don't know.
Seriously, you would tell me
if you knew how to time travel, right?
(lofi hip hop beat)
(shutter snaps)
In today's video,
we're gonna be talking about manipulating time in our videos
by using something called a time lapse.
I'm gonna talk briefly about what a time lapse is,
I'm gonna talk about why you might wanna do it,
and then I'm gonna go through three different ways
that you can do it and the pros and cons of each method.
But, before we get into it, head down to the comment section
and let me know what you use time lapses for.
And on your way down there,
hit that like button to let me know you're paying attention.
Okay, what in the name of Casey Neistat is a time lapse?
A time lapse is a video that's sped up
faster than realtime to show the passing of time.
Remember all those boring classes you took in high school?
A time lapse is what you wish you could have done
in real life to make them go faster.
It's basically putting life on fast forward.
But why would you wanna use a time lapse in your videos?
Generally, I think there are three main reasons.
The first reason, as I mentioned before,
is to show the passing of time.
If, in your video, you have a scene that's ending,
and the next shot doesn't pick up for a couple hours later
in the day, you can show your audience
that time has passed by showing
five seconds of a time lapse in between those two shots.
Even though your audience
is only watching five seconds' worth of video,
they subconsciously know that a lot more time has passed,
because of how sped up that time was.
The second reason that you might wanna use a time lapse
is just for a visually interesting shot.
If you need some interesting B roll,
something to catch the viewer's attention,
you can use a time lapse, and it can be very helpful.
After watching a bunch of clips that were all in realtime,
seeing something that's sped up by 10,000%
will definitely be more interesting to them.
And the third reason you might wanna use a time lapse
is just for a specific vibe.
Now, this isn't a hard rule or anything,
but generally, time lapses aren't super relaxing to watch.
Some of them can be, but often,
when you're watching something super sped up like that,
it's kind of more jarring than it is relaxing.
But if you're looking for something
with kind of a frantic vibe to it, pair a time lapse
with some speedy music, and you're off to the races.
(brisk percussion music)
Okay, so now we know what they are,
and we know why we might wanna do them,
but that doesn't do us much good
if we don't know how to do a time lapse.
Like I said before,
I'm gonna go over three different ways to do it
and the pros and cons of each method.
I use all of these in different situations.
It just depends on what I need.
That being said, a little disclaimer,
the second method is actually a little bit specific
to the type of camera that you have.
The way that I'm going to show you how to do it
is specific to Sony cameras,
but I know there are a lot of other cameras,
and even phones, out there that can also do it this way.
So as long as you're familiar with the functions
of your camera, you might be able to make this work as well.
Okay, in order to show you the first method
of how to shoot a time lapse,
we're actually gonna try our hand at some time travel here
and go back to when I was setting up to shoot this video.
(audio distorts)
What is up, people from the future?
Dunna from the past here.
I'm just about to set up to shoot the video
talking about three different ways to do a time lapse,
and I thought that this might be the perfect way
to show you guys the first of three,
mostly because we're already doing it.
Basically, the first way that you can do it
is you just roll video and speed it up in post.
The obvious advantage to doing it this way
is that it's easy.
You're already rolling video;
all you do is just keep rolling it.
Now, that being said, I would suggest a couple of things.
First of all, lock off your focus into manual focus mode.
So for this example, I'm gonna lock off focus
to the vanishing cabinet back there,
where I'm going to be doing most of the work
setting up my set to shoot.
The reason you wanna lock off focus
is so that when things are moving around in the frame,
it's not constantly hunting for focus,
because when you speed that up,
it's gonna look quite jarring.
We want it to stay focused in the same area
so that it looks nice and smooth.
The pros for using this method
are the fact that it's super easy to do.
If you're already set up and shooting video,
all you do is let it run, and then just speed it up later.
Depending on what software you use,
it's usually as easy as two or three clicks,
and you've got the whole thing sped up.
This method is also really handy
because you have the ability to go back to realtime.
So if something happens that you want to show in realtime,
you just slow the clip back down, and you're good to go.
So for example, I just walked back up to the camera,
took my manual focus off so that it would auto-focus
on my face, and I can start talking to you
without ever cutting the clip.
Then when I'm ready, I can get out of the frame,
turn manual focus back on, and go back into it.
And the third thing that's really handy about this method
is you can also record audio at the same time.
You can separate your audio and your video
and just use that audio still.
Okay, so I've got most of my setup ready to go,
but I'm gonna need to borrow my camera.
So let's hop back into the future,
and we'll talk about way a little bit more.
Now, some of the downsides to this method
are the fact that you're kind of limited
in how much motion blur you can do.
Personally, I like time lapses
that have a lot of motion blur
to show that things are moving really fast,
and when you speed it up this way,
it doesn't really give you that look.
Another downside
is that you're not getting the best quality of the three.
It's not bad; if you're shooting in 4K,
you're still getting the same quality that you were
when you were shooting video anyway.
But, method number three
is gonna give us the best quality for sure.
Another downside are the file sizes to this method.
If you want to shoot a half-hour of video
and compress it down to five seconds,
you literally have to shoot a half-hour of video.
That can leave you with huge file sizes,
and while we're speaking of computers,
it's also gonna be really hard on your computer.
I know every time I pull one of these big video files
into Premiere Pro and try and speed it up
by a whole bunch, it really taxes the computer.
And the final downside is just that you're limited
by your camera's record time limit.
Some of the newer hybrid cameras are starting
to get rid of the time limit, but a lot of them
still have that 30-minute record limit on them.
So, if you wanted to do a time lapse that spanned
over 30 minutes, you might not be able to do that
unless you're really quick on making sure
you're right there to start it recording again
when it hits that first time limit.
Okay, onto the second method of getting a time lapse.
Like I said before,
this is the one that's a little bit specific
to whatever camera you might have.
In the Sony cameras, this is called S&Q.
So what you're gonna have to do
is turn your camera into S&Q mode,
and then go into the S&Q settings.
Now, here, it gives you some options.
You can record at up to 120 frames per second,
and it will play back down to 24 frames per second.
So you can do slow motion right inside your camera.
Or, you can go the other way,
and that's what we're gonna do.
You can go down to shooting one frame per second,
and it'll play back as fast
as 30 frames per second. (buzzer sounds)
Now, in my case, typically, I choose one frame per second
and speed it up to 24 frames per second.
So again, another pro for this method
is that it's relatively easy to set up.
Basically, you switch into that mode,
you hit record, and you're good.
The best part about this method
is that it's super convenient.
All of the time lapsing, all of that speeding up,
it does it right in camera, so you can watch back
your time lapse immediately after you're done.
And with this method, you can actually play
with your motion blur a little bit better.
Because we know we're not going to be able
to go into realtime in this method,
we can play with our shutter speed
to make sure that the motion blur is there.
If you're doing humans moving around,
something like 1/5th of a second or 1/10th of a second
should give you the desired effect.
And the final advantage for this
is that it's super easy on the computer.
When you put it into your editing software,
it's just another video file.
The video editing software
doesn't know that it's a time lapse.
It just sees the frames, and it plays them back.
As for the limitations of this method,
specifically with Sony, it'll only go up to 1080.
So we've lost the ability to do 4K in this,
which is kind of a bummer.
But if you're shooting in 1080 anyway, this is okay.
Again, every camera might have different options
as far as this goes.
Maybe your camera doesn't limit you to a smaller resolution.
Another limitation specifically in the Sony cameras
is that you can only go as slow as one frame per second,
so if you're trying to do something like the clouds moving,
where you wanna use like, a three-second or a five-second
per shot, you really can't do that with this method.
Maybe if your clouds are moving really fast,
it'll look good, though.
Another downside to this one is that we've got no audio,
we're just recording video in this case,
and we also don't get the option
to go back into realtime like we did with the first method.
Basically, use this when you for sure want a time lapse,
you want better motion blur than in the first method,
and you don't want the headache of having to put together
a time lapse later in your computer.
By the time that you import that footage into your computer,
it's already a time lapse.
You're good to go.
I guess too, if you wanna send this straight to your phone
to post, this is the best way to do it.
Okay, moving onto the third and final.
This is the classic way to do a time lapse.
This method includes using
your camera's built-in intervalometer
or an external intervalometer to take photos
(shutter snaps)
and then stitch them together later.
This is the method that you wanna use if you wanna have
the highest quality possible for your time lapse.
That's really the biggest advantage to this method.
On a lot of cameras nowadays,
you're shooting in 24 megapixels, which is basically
a 6K video file when all is said and done.
You can use that to crop in and reframe or add movement.
Another advantage is you also have the ability
to shoot in either raw or .jpeg, raw giving you
incredible flexibility as far as editing and post.
.Jpeg's still probably better than shooting video.
And the final advantage of this
is that it gives you the most flexibility
as far as how the time lapse actually looks in the end.
So when we were talking about motion blur
and all that kind of stuff before,
this is the one that's gonna give you the most flexibility.
We can add lots of motion blur.
We can do shots that are five, 10 seconds apart.
You can span over an entire night
to do night sky time lapses.
You can set your intervalometer to whatever you want.
So this is really the most flexible
as far as getting time lapses,
if you know you want a time lapse out of that shot.
If your camera has an intervalometer
or an interval shooting function built into it,
you're gonna wanna go into that, and you're going to want
to choose how often you want it to shoot.
This is something
that you'll have to play around with a lot.
For things like the clouds moving in the sky,
I like to do either a three-second or a five-second shutter,
and then for things like people moving,
I like to do a one-second shutter.
But it also depends on how much time
you want to then compress into your time lapse.
I'll leave a link in the description to a calculator
so that you can find out what kind of settings
you might want to get the results that you want.
But I do suggest that you play with this a lot
and just kind of have some fun with it.
You'll get used to the settings that you like.
If your camera doesn't have an intervalometer built into it,
you can buy a separate intervalometer
that will tell your camera when to shoot.
I did a video on the Syrp Genie Mini II,
which is a motion controller,
but it's got the intervalometer built into it as well.
And so, I let that be my intervalometer
and tell my camera when to shoot.
If you're shooting in raw to get the most flexibility
for editing, you're then gonna have to pull
all your photos into your photo editor of choice,
edit them there, apply, in my opinion,
probably the same edit to all of your photos
to make sure that it's consistent,
or use an app like LRTimelapse
that'll allow you to gradually change things
throughout the time lapse if you need to.
Then you have to export all of those raw files
into .jpeg files, then import those .jpeg files
into your video editor as a sequence,
and then, and only then, will it be a video file
that's sped up to the way that you want it to be.
And that's where the first con of this method comes.
It is the most time-consuming of the three methods.
Also, if you're shooting in raw,
you're gonna have some huge file sizes.
Get ready to have a giant folder full of these raw images.
Again, like the second method,
we've got no audio to go with this, so if you want audio,
you're gonna have to record that separately,
and for the most part,
there's no immediate playback if you shoot it this way.
Now, I know that there is a bit of a workaround for this
on the Sony camera if you're shooting specifically using
their interval timer that's built in on the newer cameras,
but for the most part,
if you're shooting with an interval timer on most cameras,
there's no way to preview your time lapse.
So again, you wanna use this if you want the most control,
if you want the highest quality possible,
and if you want to shoot over very long times.
(Dunna sighs) Okay,
that's three methods that you can use
to shoot time lapses for your videos,
but as always, I wanna hear from you.
So make sure to head down to the comment section below
and leave me a comment, letting me know
which of the three methods is your favorite,
or maybe I missed one.
Maybe you've got another idea
that you can use to shoot time lapses.
Let me know down there, and on your way down,
make sure to hit that like button and subscribe.
Make sure to hit the bell notification
so you don't miss any of my future videos.
Thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you next time.
(lofi hip hop beat)