- Hey guys, welcome to Travel Feels.
Today we're gonna talk about some easy ways
to take your time lapses to the next level.
Let's do this!
(inspiring music)
Time lapses can be a really great way
to make your travel films even better.
I probably should be doing more time lapses.
I just never get around to them cause they take
so much time, but they're really worth it,
they're really impressive.
And they just add that nice extra level of quality
to your travel films.
So in this tutorial, we're going to be talking about
how to do a little bit of a zoom into your time lapse.
Going from a wide shot to a tight shot,
a zoom in and a zoom out of that.
(electronic music)
It's a really great way to just make your time lapses
a little bit more interesting and a little bit different
from other people's time lapses.
So to do this it's actually fairly easy.
But I am gonna be showing you how to do it in Aftereffects.
I think that's the best way to do it.
But you could potentially do it in Premiere
or any other editing program also.
But Aftereffects has some tools that the other
programs don't have that just make it that much
easier and that much better.
Alright so first off,
all you need to do is bring in your time lapses.
You can just double click there, import,
and just choose the first one and then import
jpeg sequence.
Really easy to bring them into Aftereffects.
I've already brought 'em in so I'm good.
And then you can see I have some different time lapses
here.
These two are basically the same
and then there's a zoomed in version in the middle.
So all these time lapses were shot on the GH5.
I wanted to test out the time lapse a little bit.
The wides were shot on the 35 mil Sigma 1.4
and the zoomed in shots were shot on this 7200.
On the next example, I have another wide here
and then I did a zoomed in slow motion shot
on the GH5.
I wanted to show you guys a little different
technique that you could do with the zoomed in
effect on time lapses.
Now I'm not gonna go into detail about how to shoot
time lapses, there's tons of videos on those.
But I will say, make sure you're shooting in manual.
Don't have anything on auto.
Don't have the white balance on auto,
don't have ISO on auto, don't have anything on auto.
You want it to be as consistent as possible.
Focus, everything has to be on manual.
And also, what really helps is having an ND filter.
I like to add a little bit of motion blur
to my time lapses.
I don't like it when it's just stick figures
like this moving around.
You want that motion blur when something's moving.
It just makes it a lot nicer.
So with an ND filter, you can shoot at a really
slow shutter speed.
I'm typically shooting at somewhere around
shutter speed six or somewhere around there.
It depends a little bit on how fast the things
are moving and how wide or how tight the shot is.
So ND filters are a must.
You need them so you can do that slow shutter speed
in order to get that motion blur in each frame.
Like you can see on this frame of the cars going by,
there's nice motion blur in there
to indicate that they're moving.
And it just makes it a lot more smooth.
So I basically did one wide shot.
Then I switched the lenses and I did a zoomed in shot
and I switched the lenses again and I did another
wide shot.
And then we're gonna be going from this wide shot
zooming into that close one,
and then zooming back out.
And the reason why you wouldn't just zoom straight in
on the wide shot is because you would lose
so much resolution
that it wouldn't look very good.
So, you know if I zoom in on this,
way in, you can tell it just isn't sharp,
it just doesn't look good at all.
So what I do is I do a wide shot
and I do a zoomed in shot
and then I transition from one to the other
and then back out to the wide shot if I want to.
So this is really easy actually.
How we're gonna do this is we're gonna take
that zoomed in shot and we're gonna bring it over top
this wide shot
and we're gonna decrease the opacity to 50%
just so we can see what's going on here.
And then we're gonna zoom in on this wide shot
until it's about the same size as that zoomed in shot.
It's a little bit hard to see here
but just play around with it.
And we're gonna also move the position
of it so it matches the zoomed in shot.
And it's a little bit smaller.
You can tell by this building here kind of
what's going on.
It's never gonna match up exactly
but you should get it pretty close.
The closer it is, the better the effect will be.
So this is pretty close now.
I can fiddle around with it a little bit more.
We're pretty much spot on now.
So now we have the zoomed in shot
and the wide shot lined up.
And now what we do is we just right click
and add a null object.
A null object is basically just
a layer that holds information or values.
It doesn't actually show up in your video clip
or do anything else, but it can hold values.
And I'm also gonna add the scale and position values
to this last wide shot so they match.
And you can just do that by copying and pasting
the values to the other clip.
And so that'll be later on once I zoom back out.
And now what you want to do is you want to parent
all three of these layers to that null object.
And what parenting means is that anything
that I do to the null object will also happen
to the other clips.
So if I scale up the null object,
the other clips will also be scaled up in the same way.
So whatever I do to the null object
also happens to the other clips.
So I'm gonna take all three clips,
I'm gonna grab this (inaudible) and I'm gonna
parent it to the null object.
And now when I go to scale out on the null object,
it scales all three clips at the same time.
Alright, so first step is done.
And now we can bring the opacity of the zoomed in shot
back to 100.
And you can see that the clips don't quite match,
so we can just color correct that zoomed in shot
a little bit.
It's a little bit brighter and a little bit
more blue, so we're just gonna darken it up a little bit
here and try to match it with the wide shot
a little bit better.
It doesn't matter so much, but it's good that they
match a little bit more.
Alright, so that's pretty close, good enough
for this tutorial.
And then what we do is we just make the zoom action
on this null object.
So we go to the scale and we're gonna start
zooming somewhere around here.
And we're gonna scale
and we're also gonna add a keyframe for the position
and we're gonna zoom in on this so it's just the
zoomed in clip.
And we can also play around with the position
a little bit if we don't like where it lands.
And that's looking pretty good.
So now we can see that it zooms in on that.
And we don't want this square to be showing here.
So what we're gonna do is we're gonna bring in
the zoomed in clip so we're gonna start at 0 opacity
and then add a keyframe and then we're gonna go
to 100% here.
So as it zooms in, the zoomed in clip fades in
and we have it at the end there.
And to make these transitions a little bit nicer
and smoother, I like to use ease and wizz.
It's a really good plug in.
You can actually get it for free from aescripts.com.
Just look up ease and wizz.
And then you can actually name your own price.
If you don't want to pay anything for it,
you can just put zero,
and if you do wanna donate some money to the guys
who made this, you can pay some money for that.
But it's a really handy tool.
You can use this on pretty much anything
to just make those transitions more smooth.
So just take those keyframes
and we're gonna press apply
with these settings.
And now it's a little bit more smooth.
And we can actually make this transition a little
bit longer I think.
Alright, that's looking pretty good.
So it goes from the wide, zooms into the tight shot,
and then we're gonna do another zoom out
back into the wide.
So you can actually just grab all these keyframes,
command copy, command c, and then command paste,
command v, and you're gonna grab them all,
you're gonna go to keyframe assistant,
and you can't see it, but time reverse keyframes.
And so it's black behind because this clip
because the second wide clip isn't in there.
So we're gonna put it down below here.
And again we're gonna fade out of this zoomed shot,
so add a keyframe.
And put it to zero.
And we're gonna move that back a little bit.
And there we go, so we're going from wide,
zooming into the tight
and then zooming back out.
Now, it's still,
you can see the transition
and it also needs a little bit of something extra,
and what that extra is is motion blur.
And this is really easy to do.
All you need to do is click this little button here.
It enables motion blur for layers
and then just choose all three layers
and click this little button here.
And it will add motion blur onto those clips
when they move fast.
So now it's gonna add the motion blur
and now we can see ass it zooms in,
there's nice motion blur,
and it just makes the zoom a little bit more realistic
and more smooth.
So that's basically it.
Super easy, it takes a little bit of time
but it's really worth it.
It really takes your time lapses to the next level
and gives it that extra little bit of quality look
to it.
It just keeps your time lapses a little bit more
interesting.
And then you would color grade this
and then you're good to go.
Okay, I'm gonna show you guys the second example here.
Really similar thing.
We would let this time lapse go
and then we're gonna zoom into this slow motion shot
this time.
So what we're gonna do is we're gonna make
the opacity 50 on the zoomed in shot
and then we're gonna scale up the wide shot
until they're about the same.
We're gonna try to match them as best as possible.
Just keep tweaking, going back and forth,
until they match.
I'm kind of looking mainly at this light post here
and how it lines up.
Alright so that's looking pretty good.
Then we can put the opacity back to 100
and we're gonna right click, add a null object.
And then we're gonna parent both of these clips
to this null object.
And we can zoom back out now.
And we can actually change the position.
Alright, so that's looking good.
Again, we're gonna color correct the zoomed in shot
to match a little bit better.
Same thing again, just dropping down the
exposure a little bit and we're also gonna
get rid of some of that blue tint.
Alright, so that's matching better now.
And then we're gonna drop the opacity
of the zoomed in shot to 0 and we're gonna add in
our zoom here.
So drop some keyframes
and then do the zoom in.
A little bit more.
And there we go.
We're zooming in from this wide to this tight.
And we're gonna fade that in.
We're gonna add this ease and wizz to it
to make it a little bit more smooth.
And we're also gonna add the motion blur right there
and those two and then as it zooms in
it's nice and smooth
and then we're in this slow motion all of a sudden.
So we're going from this quick time lapse
all of a sudden zoomed into this slow motion moment
of this random guy biking by
and the cars going by.
So it's a really cool effect, really easy to do.
You can do this in Premiere
but it is a lot harder and it won't be as clean
as in Aftereffects.
So I like to do this effect in Aftereffects.
It works really well with the null objects
and the parenting and all that.
So there you go, if you're looking to spice up
your time lapses a little bit,
try some of these techniques out.
There's a lot of cool things you can do with this.
You know, you could zoom in and follow a boat going
down a river or zoom in and do slow motion
of a crowd of people or whatever it is.
You can really do some cool effects
with this little zoom transition on your time lapses.
Again it is a little bit more time
and a little bit harder to do
but it will take your time lapses to the next level
and really just differentiate your time lapses
from the other guys.
So one more time, here's the final result.
That's it for me today.
I hope you enjoyed this little tutorial.
Guys, enjoy the filmmaking process
and go get some of those travel feels.