Gadgetory

now most of us have seen those cool time-lapse videos that compress almost imperceptibly slow events in the short videos seemingly speeding up time before your very eyes but how are they made and more importantly could you make one on your own I'm antuan goodwin with cnet.com and i'm here to show you how you'll need a few things before you get started a camera that can shoot still photos at timed intervals we're using the gopro HD hero photo editing software with a batch edit function we're using a front view on the PC which can be found over on download.com and some sort of video software to stitch your photos together in this video we're going to using quicktime pro is cross-platform software step one you're going to want to familiarize yourself with your camera's interval photography mode and for some of you this will be as simple as selecting a mode on your camera for others it may mean taking advantage of custom hardware software or firmware the exact process for this step will vary depending on the make and model of your camera for this video we're going to be using the gopro HD hero now load up an empty SD card select the time between the shot here we have the choice between 25 10 and 30 second intervals mount your camera depress the shutter and go find something to do while the camera snaps away now you could point your camera at anything you'd like but I'm a car tech editor so I am line out of the windshield of the car on a trip from LA to San Francisco step 2 once you've got all your photos captured you'll need to treat them however after hours of shooting we have almost 5000 5 megapixel shots now that's way too big of a picture for even the nicest HDTV on the market and way too many photos to be individually resizing you'll need to find a way to betch process these photos now you could use software like Adobe Photoshop but we'll be using the free oron view software on the pc from the file menu select batch conversion rename then navigate to the folder that contains your images and add them all to the batch now you'll need to do two things under the best conversion setting headache click the advanced button in the dialog box that appears check resize and set a value for the long side of each image then click canvas size and apply a value to be cropped now what you're aiming for is an HD friendly dimension of either 1280 by 720 pixels or 1920 x 1080 pixels the exact number that you're going to use to get there will vary depending on the image size captured by your camera so you're going to need to do a little math here we're going with a 1280 width and a 240 pixel crop for our 720p video now select the folder for your resized images click start batch and go find something else to do while your photos process step 3 once you've got all your images resized up fire quicktime pro and from the file menu select open image sequence now navigate to the folder that contains all of your resized images select the first one you'll have to select a frame rate here we chose 24 frames per second click OK and then go make yourself a cup of coffee while QuickTime stitches the images together into a video step 4 when QuickTime Pro is done you'll have a working preview of your time-lapse video but you'll still have to export a final file for use in other programs go to file then export to bring up the export menu now under option select size and make sure your dimensions are set to your liking now in addition to the HD sizes there are also presets for mobile devices like the iPhone so choose the one that works best for you now give your file a name and hit save you'll probably want to go grab a movie or something at this point because it's the longest part of the process and can take anywhere from several minutes to a few hours depending on your computer's processing horsepower once everything is done you'll have a completed time-lapse video that you can share with your friends on video sites like YouTube or Vimeo time-lapse photography is a great way to document natural events like the blooming of a flower or as we've done here capture an entire road trip in just a few minutes now these same steps can also be applied to stop-motion photography for those of you who want to get in touch with your inner ray harryhausen so there you have it time-lapse photography in just a few easy stay I'm antuan goodwin with cnet com