Convert normal rate video to Time Lapse look

[Joseph W. bourke]

And beyond Dave’s suggestion, if Posterize Time isn’t smooth enough, 3rd party plugins such as Twixtor and Kronos by The Foundry can do some amazing frame rate slowdowns which compare pretty favorably to high-speed cameras.

Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com

[Stephen Curry]

thanks for the posts guys but I was hoping for some guidance on how to actually go through the process. I’ve never actually used these effects within AE and Im not sure how….

[Michael Szalapski]

What, exactly, are you trying to do? Time Lapse is just sped up footage. Are you wanting to make your footage go faster?
If so, you can do it with Time Remapping. Just read up on how to use Time Remapping here: [link] It even has links to video tutorials!

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Stephen Curry]

well my understanding of time-lapse is that the images are shot at certain intervals…(ie every 1 sec) which is then done over a long period of time.

but with my current normal video shooting 30 images/frames every 1 sec I need to somehow extract every 30th image…. speeding up the video I dont think would give it the look im after it would just making it go faster….which you can do now with Time>Time Stretch

Ive never used Time remapping so I was looking for a tutorial on how to do it correctly

Sorry if this isnt very clear…

[Michael Szalapski]

Yes, time lapse is generally taking pictures at an interval and then playing them back at the standard frame rate.

The thing is, all that’s really doing is making fast-motion video. Speeding your video up is doing the exact same thing.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Stephen Curry]

OK the impetus for this whole question is this…Canon use to make a camera a few year back that would take Time-lapse video…basically by automatically taking a shot every sec or so…(Canon SD790 IS)…however, their newer models no long have this feature and I was wondering if I could “recreate” within AE

#1:
Show your 30fps video, but show only 1 frame of it every second? Things still take place in real time, it’s just that you see the action frozen for a second, then you proceed to another still frozen during the next second, and so on.

no, showing only 1 frame of it every second would be just a long boring video… 🙂

maybe if I explained it like this

I know this is obvious and Im not trying to sound patronizing so bear me out and maybe I can explain it better…

A. when you film you are continually taking images (30 every sec)…

B. when you film in time lapse you are filming the same scene but only taking a shot once a sec…(so you get the stop motion look and feel)…

You film over a long period of time but what you ultimately get is a short video on the camera’s SD Card because it was filmed at only 1fps instead of the normal 30fps (so filming for an hour in time lapse would only give you a 2min long video)

So what Im trying to ask is if it’s possible, within AE, to automate the procedure and take take every 30th frame from that 60min long video and make it into a 2min time lapse video

(My Math)

60min video would be (60min * 60sec) = 3,600sec long video.
3,600 sec * 30fps = 108,000 individual frames in the 60min video.
take those 108,000 frame and pull out every 30th frame = 3600 individual frames. 3,600 / 30 = 120frame = 2min

[Marco Rosales]

OK guys I’m going to try to resurface this topic because I’m looking for exactly the same thing and perhaps Stephen is not using the best example with the one second photo. We have all seen videos of a flower grow right. They show the process from germination to full flower. Now to do this let say for example that the flower takes 10 days to grow (this is just an example I don’t really know how long it takes for a flower to blossom but stay with me…) so I would set my camera to take still images at an interval of lets say an hour so at the end of the 10 day process I would have 240 still images. If I then convert the stills to a 30 fps video I would have the Blossoming flower process in just 8 seconds.

So, and I’m hoping you are still with me, lets say I have a very high capacity video camera that can record 10 days of video of the same flower process and I wanted to get the same 8 second video time lapse effect, I would have to remove all the frames in between each hour of video to have only 240 frames at the end.

So, long explanation but I hope you guys see what I mean, is there some software that you know of that given a video can remove frames for a specific interval so as to get a time lapse still image effect?

[Marco Rosales]

I don’t mean to offend anyone but it seems to me that you guys are reading the question too literal! the 10 day video was just an example to illustrate the point.

Yes, there is a proper tool for everything but sometimes you don’t have those tools. I ran a race this past weekend with a video camera on my helmet and it lasted 35 minutes so If I wanted to get a 2 min time lapse effect I would have taken 3600 still images at a 17.5 sec interval (provided I want to display 30fps). In any case too much math !

Thanks anyways…

[Marco Rosales]

Thanks Dave. I cant remember now but I had a data recovery disc tool that would recovered video files as individual frames which sounds kind of crazy but I would use to do just that. This was a long time a go and cant remember but, oh well…

thanks again!

[Stephen Curry]

Hi Marco,

I’ve never found a solution to this but we have the same issue/desire that we are trying to achieve. It would be nice if there was some sort of expression you could type that simply tells AE to display/render every X frame.

The guy who say its just a matter of speeding up the footage I don’t think fully understands time-lapse or maybe its just me who doesn’t understand.

From all the time-lapse footage I’ve seen; (i.e. people in a train station lets say) the person being filmed may be next to a phone booth in one frame and then several feet away in the next frame and so forth…speeding up your normal footage doesn’t do that IMO. It still shows the entire progression of the person, just faster. time-lapse gives the appearance of a person almost sliding/hopping/jumping from one position to the next.

Also it seems the people on the forum are asking us to use a still camera to make our time lapse footage (as its meant to be) but that’s not the issue. I/we are trying to convert normal footage and give it a time lapse feel and appearance. Its like someone telling you to just go dig for real gold when all you want is gold plating

What we’re trying to achieve could be done manually by rendering out your footage as individual images and then importing back in every 10th/20th/30th image (of your choice) back into AE and rendering just those images into a new video file….but who wants to spend all that time doing that…

That’s why I asked if there was a plug-in/expression/trick of the trade that could do the tedious stuff.

I found this AE template:

https://videohive.net/item/stop-motion-photo-slideshow/1116243

In this template the author seems to have managed to give his video the look that I want and when I asked him how he did it he mentioned that he used the time posterize effect…but Ive haven’t messed with it yet to see.