In this week's episode I'll show you how to edit Time Lapse videos in After Effects.
Adorama TV presents Exploring Photography with Mark Wallace.
Hi everybody welcome to another episode of Exploring Photography right here on Adorama TV.
Brought to you by Adorama, the best camera store hands down in the entire world. Check them out at Adorama.com
Well last week, in last week's Exploring Photography episode, I showed you how to
shoot stills
for time-lapse video, and this week we're going to learn how to take those stills
and edit them in After Effects, and the question is why After Effects? There are
all kinds of different applications that you can use
to create time-lapse videos. Well many of them have already been covered
on Adorama TV, and so you can look at those in check out the Adorama
Learning Center
so we're gonna focus specifically on After Effects because there are a lot of
really cool things you can do and
I'm gonna keep it really simple so if you don't know anything about
After Effects
that's ok, you can dive right in and follow right along. Before we do that
though I would remind you that Adorama has some awesome
photo contests you can click the link it's absolutely free and the good news
is
we can win some awesome prizes, so enter today!
All right we've got a tonne to cover today so without further ado let's hop in to
After Effects to learn how to edit
time-lapse videos. Well before we jump into After Effects we first need to prepare
our images for import into After Effects so I have a Lightroom catalog has all the
images that I shot for our time lapse video.
What I've done here is I've just divided these up into some collections
based on the shoots around about one, round about two, round about three, so these are just
me shooting at this little roundabout in different locations I can scroll through
she really fast you can see
but that looks like. We're going to work with this sunrise
images that a shot you can see if I scroll through here that the sun is gonna
pop up eventually.
Now, what we need to do though is we need to correct
the aspect ratio and any little things that
need to be fixed like these images are and not level or
needs other adjustments to them. So what we're gonna do here is
I'm going to do to this very first image in the sequence,
and I will go to the developed module by hitting D
for develop, and I want to show you what I did with the crop. So if I go into the crop tool,
you can see that I have cropped this and taken out a little bit at the bottom,
and a little bit at the top, specifically I've cropped this to a 16 x 9
aspect ratio. Now by default my camera shoots
a 4 x 6 aspect ratio which we don't want
we want a wide screen video which is 16 x 9 so I've done that.
I've cropped this, and also I want to make sure that these pictures are all straight
so I'm gonna draw the line across here using my
angle tool here to make sure everything is straight, that looks good,
so I will close that. Now what I wanna do is I want to apply that exact same crop and angle
correction to
all my images so they don't jump around, so they're exactly the same.
So I'll go back to the library module and the very first image selected
I will go to the very end of this sequence,
hit shift and click that. So they're all selected
and then I'm just going to say sync settings and I'm going to make sure I've selected
'all', because I want them all to be exactly the same, now click
'synchronised'. Right so now every single image in this
sequence is going to be cropped
at 16 x 9 in the exact same place
and levelled, so from the first the last, these are all going to look
exactly the same. Right, now we need to get these to a
folder so that we can import them into After Effects.
We want to make sure that they're the right file size: and we're
editing in HD 1080 P which is 1920
by 1080. So what we'll do here is we will go to file,
export, and then we're going to export this to a specific location, so I'm going
to say sunrise
16 x 9, so we know where exactly that is
on my hard drive. Now the other thing that you might want to do is to rename
your files because
After Effects is going to expect these to be mean sequentially so image1, image2,
image3,
so it needs to look and seal. So if your camera doesn't sequentially
number, your images you might want to rename those.
Mine are sequentially numbered so I don't have to rename the files,
but if you need to that's where you do it. Right, we're gonna export these
as a jpeg image, really the quality around 80,
that's fine for what we need to do, you might wanna increase that,
or decrease that based on your settings, but 80 is a good place.
We also wanna edit this in an RGB colour space,
so you can use a smaller colour space, sRGB, I'm gonna use
Adobe RGB for my export, and then I'm going to resize these images
so they're 1920 x 1080, which is in
high definition 1080p image size,
so I'll leave that at a resolution of 240.
I'm going to sharpen these for screen, it's makes them look a little bit better,
and then, I'll show these in Finder when we're done.
So I'm gonna click export, and then with the power of
video editing, I'll show you the results here in a second.
Well our export is finished in real time, that took quite a while so you might wanna grab
a cuppa coffee
because you can't just edit out the time it takes to export those images.
Well we have everything set I can preview these, you can see there in 16 x 9
aspect ratio
and they are in order of sequence. So we're all set to go.
So we'll zip over to After Effects the first thing we want to do is create a new
composition if your brand new to After Effects just do exactly what I'm gonna show you
here, you'll be just fine.
So I'm gonna create a new composition, and I'm going to name this composition sunrise,
you don't have to but I like to keep it nice and friendly, and then
the preset that we want to use needs to match the output
of the video we're editing. Well we know we're editing a 1080p
high definition file so I can choose
HDTV 1080 29 97 which is the
frame rate. Now notice that the width and the height
of our composition, it matches exactly
the width and our height of the export that we just did.
Right so that's all set up we can say ok, now the next thing we need to do is
import all those files, and this is where it gets to be really easy. Go to File,
Import, and I knew you would think that we'd say important multiple files, but we
actually just click
File, Import File, and I'll show you why. So we'll click that
and then we're gonna navigate to that folder that I created
which was the sunrise folder. So
we're in Time Lapse here, so here's that Sunrise, 16 x 9
folder. What I want to do is I want to look at the very first
image in that sequence which is image 0313, and I'll go up from there.
Now down here this is very important, we are
importing our jpeg format, it's important that you have Jpeg
Sequence selected. The nice thing is you can do this
two files you can even do this with raw files and the
Adobe Camera Raw convertible appear. I like to do all my conversions before
it saves a lot or render time. Now if you have gaps
in your image numbering so maybe you have 321 ,323 and 322 is missing,
you can click Force Alphabetical Order, and that will close those gaps, without that if there's a gap
you're going to get a blank, just a black
frame and a warning that says 'hey you've got some
some gaps in your file'. So we don't have any gaps so we don't have to check that.
Right, when I click open, this is all going to come in as one
sequence of images and so here it is
just comes in is one sequence it's called Image
0313 to 1250. So that's all those images
it comes in just like footage like filed footage that you'd have from a video.
Now what we can do that then, is we can just take this
and we can drop it down here
into our sequence, and there you have it.
We just have to render this and it's done. Now for those of you who to want to know a
little bit more about the advanced settings, for example
setting how many frames per second that you use
can change that by right clicking, and you can say
Interpret Footage, Main,
and here's where you can change the frame rate
so by default is 30 frames per second which matches our composition settings,
but what if you want to slow things down or speed things up,
you can change that here and say, I only want 2 frames per second or 2
images per second or I want 60 per second
it doesn't matter you can change that there, I'm gonna cancel that.
Another thing you can do to change how fast or how slow something goes
is you can right click on your
image sequence, you can go to time
and then you can go to time stretch. Now time stretch
lets you slow things down or speed things
up. So with my Sunrise sequence I shot too many
images, it takes too long for the sun to come up, and so what I can do here
is I can set this stretch factor from
100 down to 50, in other words take
half as much time. which makes things go faster
so take 50 percent of the time, that is making go twice as fast,
I can say okay so that's the joy of
editing in After Effects, you can do all these different time affects
very very easily. Once that's all done,
if you're new to After Effects, hit the spacebar to play it's really not gonna play in
real time here, it
has to render, and so you need to render that.
That's where the complicated stuff comes if you're new to After Effects let me
walk you through it
and I'll show you how to output an actual movie.
So what we'll do here is we're now going to say, File.
Export. Now you'd want to normally save
your entire project,
I'm gonna take a risk and not to that. So I'm gonna export this, to
the Adobe Media Encoder Queue,
Adobe Media Encoder gives you a lot more flexibility and choices
than just the render queue, so I'm gonna add this to the Adobe Media Encoder Queue,
and as soon as I do that Adobe Media Encoder
will actually open up, and
once it does we have all these choices. So here it is,
now what we can do here on the left hand side, we can choose
the type the file we want. Now I want a H.264 file,
because I want to put this on the web. You can change that by clicking on it,
i's going to connect to the Adobe Dynamic link server, you don't have to know what that is.
But then you get all these other formats, you can do this as H.264,
or MPEG2 or 4, or QuickTime or PNG or TIFF or Targa or however you wanna slice it
you can do that. If you know what any of those things are just stick with H.264
because underneath that you've got some presets
for different types of phones, for Apple products
for the Nook, you can have TiVo
Vimeo. We're going to choose; YouTube,
1080p HD, click on that.
We'll say ok, and then,
now that we have all that stuff done then we can say,
ok go, and I'll click the start queue button,
and this is going to output a file. In fact can you tell that file
where to go here. So what we'll do here is we'll set that really fast.
I'm going to click...
sunrise, actually output, that's where we want that to go.
I'll name that sunrise, and I'll show you the results, I'll save that,
I'll start the encoder,
one thing to note, if you've done a lot of stuff to your,
your After Effects project,
this might take a while. This is only going to take a minute,
if you have a slow computer, or if you've done a lot of effects in After Effects,
this can take up to 30 minutes even hour, sometimes more.
So the more you do, the longer it takes and that's why
prepping your images
in Lightroom beforehand is going to save you a tonne of
post-production time. Alright let's let this
render out and I'll show you the results. Ok our render is finished,
I can click on this output file here, it's going to open up
my folder exactly where that is I can preview this by hitting the spacebar on
a Mac
and you can see that, here goes our time-lapse video
and here comes the sun, just as we expected. That's all there is to it
using After Effects is super super easy, now why would you want to use
After Effects? Well,
the real joy here is all of the effects
in After Effects, so you can go in here, you can use any
of the effects in After Effects. You can use Time Warp, you can change it,
you can create 3D stuff, you can move the entire sequence around, you can throw it into
Premier. You have so many options when you do this in
After Effects, and if you own the entire Creative
Cloud Suite, then you've got this available to you anyway, so you
might as well use it. Well that was a tonne of fun, thank you so much for joining
me in this episode of Exploring Photography.
Now don't forget you can subscribe to Adorama TV absolutely free, so click
that link so you don't miss a single thing,
and also check out the Adorama Learning Center,
there's a lot more information on time-lapse videos
editing in post-production, stop-motion creation so you can do King Kong
kinda stuff. So check that out, it's the Adorama Learning Centre.
Thanks again for joining me this week and I'll see in the next episode.
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