Gadgetory

excellent what's up everyone I am kicking off 2016 with a much requested video on how to make a time-lapse now there are lots of different ways to make a time-lapse this isn't necessarily here's the only way to do it I'm actually going to show you three different ways that I figured out how to do it for myself and there's other ways too so leave those down in the comments section while you're maybe hit the like button if you enjoyed this video but let's start off with the three ways that I'm going to show you today one is just recording a video and I'm going to use a standard camcorder for that second way is to take pictures with a camera ideally with an intervalometer and then the third way is just going to be you use a webcam so even if you have a laptop with a built-in webcam you can make a time-lapse even if you don't necessarily have a camera now before I dive into my three methods let's start with three general best practices for shooting a time-lapse whether using my methods or whether you're using your own you should always number one use a tripod or a fixed mount your camera should be immobile it should not move and you should even place that tripod ideally somewhere where it's not likely to get kicked or bumped at all is having that static camera this is the number one key thing to getting a nice smooth time-lapse number two is to use the manual settings that your camera has to offer the camera should not do anything by itself without you telling it to that means no automatic exposure no autofocus no auto white balance turn all those auto functions off and adjust everything yourself so you have it set up right when you start the time lapse that way there will be no ships or changes as the time-lapse progresses the third thing is to think long term just generally speaking while you're setting up your shots while you're adjusting your camera is your time lapse just going to take a few minutes or is it going to go for a few hours or a few days even how might the light change over the course if you have the Sun coming up and going down we're able to action take place within the frame that you're setting up getting a wire shot is often a better way to go because you can always crop it in later and then last I would say always always use an AC adapter if you can to plug into your camera for constant power so you're not relying on a battery and then have lots and lots of storage available like you know 64 128 gig cards so you can just set it and forget it and not worry about running out of space so moving on to the first way that I make time lapses and that you can easily make time lapses too and that is pretty much to just point and shoot so you set up your camera you hit record you record video and then you bring it into an editing program later I'm going to be using mere and you just speed it up to 2,000 or 4,000 percent or something like that the pros to this method is that it's pretty easy you can just point the camera and hit record another nice thing about it is that you won't be waiting for your footage to render out later on as you would with taking a bunch of pictures and we'll be getting to that in just a second as far as what that means you can slow down the footage too when you're recording straight video so you could suddenly slow down to real-time and you might even actually have usable audio in there as well so that gives you a little bit of flexibility for editing in the future now there are some cons that go along with this as well one is that you will have very large file sizes especially if you're shooting in 4k and especially if you're shooting longer takes so that makes this kind of impractical for longer time lapses if you're shooting something to say an hour or less you're probably good but if you want to go three four or five hours or multiple days you just you're not gonna have enough space doing that and scrubbing through footage that's a shot at 1080 thirty frames per second and then sped up 5,000% can be pretty clunky especially if your system is slower or you don't have really fast storage speeds so that's something to think about if you're worried about the post-production side of it some general tips for using this standard method is one to use it for shorter time lapses so let's say an hour or less I often use this method if I'm just shooting a build that I know won't take too long also consider using a lower frame rate to conserve the disk space setting this camera to 24 frames per second rather than say 30 frames per second might use up a little bit of less space and just give you a little bit more room to work with method number two for making a time-lapse is just to take pictures but you need to take lots of pictures and that need to be evenly regulated for that you need something called an intervalometer newer cameras like my panasonic lumix lx7 as well as my GH fourth i'm using the film this right now have an intervalometer built into the software and in fact even my older camera the 5d mark ii didn't have one built in but i was able to get a third party kind of firmware add-on called the magic lantern that allowed me to do it some cameras have an external device that you can purchase to do it but for today I'm just going to be using my built-in feature right here which is really nice to have so if you're looking for a camera and you want to do this then definitely look for one that has a built-in intervalometer that will allow you to set the camera to take a picture every say one two five seconds and you can make it longer shorter than that generally speaking when I'm shooting I usually go for about one every say three seconds maybe four seconds if you're shooting something that will take longer like multiple days or you're doing photography of plants growing or something like that consider doing a much longer interval 5 seconds 10 seconds 20 seconds or more and here's a quick look at how I set up the intervalometer on the gh4 time lapse mode for the gh4 is pretty simple just make sure on this main dial you're set to full manual mode not the manual video mode although manual video mode is awesome then ever again this little jug that you got to switch it all the way over to this guy and which is the opposite side from that one which is take a single picture and then there's burst mode in a couple more so but all the way over to that and you know that you might notice down here it will give you the start time-lapse option if you hit the menu button you can go in and adjust some of the time-lapse functions such as when it starts and how long the interval is between shots I have it set to 3 seconds and how many images it should take before it stops which I usually set to the max which is 9999 see how that's said here you just take a picture and then it will continue taking pictures every 3 seconds until it hits 9999 or it runs out of space on the memory card so as long as you can take a picture every so often then you can make a time lapse with it which means that a smartphone is another viable option for something like this you can get an app set up your smartphone with the some kind of rigged old it in place and then go that route I'm not going to be diving into that for this video but it's another option if you guys want to look into it the pros for this method are that in my opinion it provides the best end results the best quality and just the sharpest image as long as you took good pictures that were in focus of course the final rendered time-lapse is also going to be very high in quality but very small and file size relative to say a single long video that you record all at once or even all of the individual pictures that you originally capture because there can be a big difference between the size of the pictures and the size of a rendered video my method results in a 4k video at the end of it for at least for this method and that's really great as well for panning and zooming so if I'm doing a 1080 video but I have a 4k image then I can take that 1080 frame and move it around there are some cons to this method that should keep in mind though one is going to be that importing and rendering a time-lapse with thousands and thousands of photos can take a really long time so you might need a higher-end system or you might just need a lot of patience to go along with that the raw images that you take when you're doing thousands of photos this way can also take up a lot of space and I've had some projects that had 30 to 50 gigs just in RAW images for a time-lapse the nice thing about that though is that after you've rendered all those photos into a single video file then you can delete all the photos and just keep the file and you're generally speaking okay the final thing you might consider is that your shutter count is going to go way up on the camera that you use so my old 5d mark ii that i use this for as a little concerned that the shutter count was getting really really high on that can also wear out that mechanism generally speaking not an issue because most cameras can take tens of thousands of photos without a problem but just something to point out some general tips for this method are that you will definitely definitely want to use an AC adapter this one is for this but i've AC adapters that go to these cameras as well and you will want a memory card that has lots of space again you with the time-lapse you want to just set it up hit go and then not really worry about it for quite a while you should also give yourself a bit of extra time to render these time lapses because I definitely been in a situation where I'm like I want to edit this video right now and then I'm like oh I need to wait like I don't know an hour - depending on how diligent I'm about refreshing things just to import all the stuff and then render it and again I'll show you in just a minute how long that actually takes the third thing is that you should always remember to resize your photos after you add them into your premiere timeline and again I'll show you that in just a second my third method is the webcam method and this method can be set up with just a simple laptop webcam and the software and the software I'm going to be using is called Crona lapse I found this a while back and it's worked great for me so I have continued to use it just remember to run it as administrator the webcam I'm using today is the Logitech c920 although if you have a laptop with a built-in webcam you can use that just as well so again you don't really need to necessarily have a camera in order to use this method once you've launched the software you can select your webcam that's plugged in hopefully and choose the resolution and the frame rate that you want it to capture at definitely use the preview function to set up your shot and make sure you're capturing everything properly and make sure it looks good and that can thing and then from there you can just simply enter a number of seconds that will elapse between the time that it captures each image the pros of using this method are that it has a minimal hardware investment so if you just have a laptop that's all you really need and a webcam of course or PC and webcam also you can use this method to capture say your desktop that you're working on so if you do a lot of Photoshop work or something like that you want to do time-lapse of it you can use that you could even connect like a real camera to this using a capture card of course you would have to pay for a capture card and capture straight from that which is something I've considered doing but I haven't quite done yet small USB webcams like the Logitech c920 are also very easy to position in interesting places since they're pretty small and I have a USB extension that I can use to position this like up above my head for those kind of cool top-down shots that I get while I'm building computers the other nice thing about this is that you can capture straight to an external SSD which is a what I do with a laptop I have it connected to that way I can just take that SSD connect it to my editing system and it's really fast I can render straight off of that or I can just copy the images very very quickly the cons to this method well the major number one comm is just that you're going to get webcam image quality the resolution is not going to be as good as a real camera so my webcam time lapses don't typically look as sharp and clean as ones I do with normal cameras also depending on the resolution and the frame rate that you're capturing at with this software at least I found that image tearing can occur at certain times although when it's sped up really fast it's really not too noticeable some general tips would be to first always make sure you go in and use the webcam software in this case it's Logitech software to turn off any of the automatic functions that it might have like autofocus auto white balance and auto exposure face tracking that kind of thing you don't want it doing any of that also you can use a lower you set it to a lower resolution and then hit preview and you can use that to frame up your shot but then close that and go back out and then choose one of the highest resolutions possible because that's just going to get you the best image quality and shrinking it down will improve the sharpness with it just a little bit remember the webcams can often capture single images at a much higher resolution than their raid for video so even though this does 1080 video it actually captures it something closer to 2k I forget exactly what it is so your next question would probably be well now that I've captured my video or my thousands of pictures how do I then take that and transform it into a nice clean looking time-lapse well I'm going to be using Adobe Premiere and I will show you how to do that right now and here's the promise to creating a time-lapse in Adobe Premiere tutorial I'm using premiere 6.0 but should be roughly the same for Creative Cloud I am going to first create a new project with my 4k preset that I already have you can make one for yourself as well I'm then first before I do anything go to preferences and then general and then change my still image default duration to two frames this is very important next up I'm going to make a new bin and then go ahead and grab all my pictures and import them now you will have to wait for a little while because depending on how many pictures you're importing depending on your system and depending on your storage configuration this can take quite a while for this reason I always make a backup and then copy on the pictures to a couple raid zero SSDs which generally speeds things up after the import finishes I'm going to grab all the images and drag them over to the timeline then we're going to zoom all the way in so I can see the very first images and I'm going to go and resize it to match the frame size usually they're a little bit larger than 4k so shrink them down usually to 84 86 % copy that motion effect that you just made and then select all the rest of the pictures on the timeline and then paste the motion effect onto them this will resize every image on the timeline and now you're ready to export your krispy 4k time lapse just remember to use proper export settings for 4k video and you can go ahead and uncheck that audio box and that is all for this video guys if you happen to learn a little something today then don't forget to hit the like button down there and feel free to comment below if you used any of these methods to make your own time lapse or if you know other fancy secret techniques that I don't know about then share them down there too the best way to help me out and support my channel though is to use my amazon link that's also down there in the video description just click it and then shop and checkout and that helps me a lot you can also visit my store at store paul's harbor net where you can find paul's hardware shirts as well as mugs and pint glasses finally don't forget to subscribe to my channel if you haven't already happy 2016 everyone and as always thank you for watching you