Time lapse in AE?

[Joe Moya]

The fastest and easiest way to get a time lapse effect would be to use a Pro-level video editing software and not use AE at all.

But, if you want to use AE… then one way would to be use the Timewarp filter…

Do a search and you will find many suggestions as to how to achieve this using AE.

Joe

Side note: … someone should site threads that provide an answer (or answer’s) to this question in the FAQ section…

[David Del]

I am really also looking for a way to do it that won’t tax my system, considering it is an hour video. If I used Vegas, I would have to nest it a few times which causes a major slow down of the system when rendering. I was hoping that AE would have a better and quicker way of doing it.

[Steve Roberts]

Posterize Time keeps time running at the same speed, but holds and skips frames to make a lower frame rate. Your footage would still look slow.

Couldn’t you just speed up the footage? (layer>time>time stretch)

[David Bogie]

Timelapse requires that you speed up the footage, showing more total clip time in a shorter span of sequence time. That means you must throw away lots of frames.

You will want to render the clip if you want to minimize processing resources. Render it and set the after-render action to reimport.

Most time-compression requires seemingly endless experimentation. The idea that your 60 minute clip needs to run in, say, 90 seconds is a good place to start but you may find the rhythm in the action is not what you envisioned. So you start playing around with lots of speed settings, tons of test renders. The best timelapse material is often a collection of several different frame rates with stylized or nearly invisible transitions between them.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Del]

Ok, thanks for the start. If I don’t use Posterize Time, do I use Time-remapping?

[Rhett Robinson]

Okay, so do you really want this to look like “real” time lapse (meaning skipped frames), or is this to just be sped up dramatically? To do the first really well, you are not going to be able to do frame averaging, so although it’s easy to just have AE pick a single frame per second, or minute, or whatever else, the quality of each shown frame will suffer.

From your description, I’d pick the second way (which Steve alluded to), by using the layer time stretch, and making it however short you want. The time stretch function is also available as one of your columns in the timeline, and is definitely not taxing on your system.

Although you still have frames that AE discards, it does a better job and conforms to the framerate you’ve selected for your comp.