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Timelapse, Can it be done in Post?
Hi, My subject pretty much sayt it all…is it possible using software to simulate timelapse with existing footage? I do have Adobe’s on location which has this feature and I’ve used it once, but it’s not always feasible to have Laptop around. I have the CS3 Suite with a Matrox RTX2. Thanks.
Jeffrey S. Gould
Action Media Productions -
5 Replies
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Absolutely.
Easiest thing is to just keep ramping up the playback speed on your timeline, try right-clicking your timeline and looking thru the properties tabs to find a playback speed adjustment. If it is not fast enough after that, you might need to export the sped-up timeline, re-import it, and repeat the accellerating again. You may or may not want to add some trails or freeze-framing trails to the treated footage to enhance the look. Play with it. It is not as elegant as true time lapse capture, because you are using much more hard drive space to generate a very short final run time. But it is simple and it works. And hard drive space is cheap to buy these days.
There are freeware and shareware apps you can use for this as well, that will look at a straignt tape playback off your DV camcorder or deck and just take grabs at designated intervals. On the PC side there is Scenalyzer. You can also use stop-motion software to capture off existing tape as well.
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Much earlier versions of Premiere had this time lapse capture feature built-in in the import settings controls, which let you do time lapse grabs on existing footage paying back in free-run mode… but the ability was removed in later versions. Now you have to buy On Location to get back a feature that the older versions had for free.
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Thank you Mark…you always come through with great info. I will look into the software you mentioned and also play with the speed controls in PPRO. I guess for something critical, I will drag out the laptop and use On Location. Thanks again.
Jeffrey S. Gould
Action Media Productions -
Inside PremierePro, right click on the clip and adjust the speed upwards.
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Speeding up the footage is only one part of it IMO. To get a true timelapse look you’ll need to remove frames. When a camera records timelapse it will record, for example, 1 second of footage every 10 seconds. If you experiment a little with the timing it can look very good.
Phil
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