HOW TO CREATE a GOPRO NIGHT LAPSE | A COMPLETE BEGINNERS GUIDE

[Music] thank you [Music] GoPro action cameras are one of my favorite cameras to use for creating night lapses this is because they're small they're portable they're waterproof and they're relatively easy to use in this video I'm going to provide to you an extensive detailed complete guide that will explain to you 100 of my GoPro night lapse process from A to Z I'm going to show you every detail that I do from setup to site location to best settings to editing I'm going to show you all of those details today so that you can have a complete 100 guide to my entire GoPro night lapse process now whether this is your first time doing a GoPro night lapse or your 100th time I feel like my guide today is going to have something for you so today's guide I'm going to divide into four main sections the first section I'm going to cover is tools the second section is setup the third section is settings and the fourth section is editing let's get started so there are five things that you need in order to create a GoPro night lapse the first item you'll need of course is a GoPro for the purpose of today's video I'm going to be using the GoPro Hero 10 for demonstrations but any GoPro that you have from the hero4 or newer most of these settings will apply to that the second thing you'll want to have is you'll want to have this USB pass-through door now this door will apply directly if you have a hero 9 or hero 10. if you have a GoPro model that's older than the 9 or 10 you're going to most likely want to put your GoPro in a cage and the reason for this USB pass-through door is this allows you to power your GoPro with an external battery pack which you'll of course want if you're going to have your GoPro set up all night doing a night lapse the GoPro battery is not going to last all night for you and most it's going to last two to three hours before it dies so you're going to want your GoPro hooked up to an external power pack the problem is if you hook it up into the USBC port with the door open it exposes your GoPro to moisture so if it rains during the night if it snows if there's a heavy do your GoPro could get damaged internally so the USB passenger door allows you to plug in the USBC cable right here without exposing the internals of your GoPro to the elements now the third thing you'll need is you'll need an external power pack the one that I recommend is this one from anchor the reason for that is it provides a lot of power for the price now all the tools I'm showing you today I have Linked In the description below so that you can check out the exact ones that I use this anchor one right here I really like because it works well with the GoPros it doesn't create some of those issues that some of the other external packs do where the GoPro won't power on or this won't power them this anchor one Powers the GoPro great I have had my GoPro hooked up to this running for three days continuously doing a night lapse and there was still some power left on this so this fully charged definitely provides plenty of power for you to do a night lapse and even if you only have this a quarter or halfway powered it'll definitely be more than enough for one night and of course you'll want the USBC cable that comes with this power pack so that you can plug it into your GoPro and power it fourth item you're going to need is a tripod now it does not have to be a fancy tripod this one right here I got on Amazon for about twenty dollars and it works great does not have to be fancy at all but you do need a tripod with a mounting plate that you can put a GoPro Mount onto so this particular GoPro Mount that I have is made of metal it holds up really well I really like it it was about ten dollars on Amazon I've linked to this in the description below if you want to check it out the plastic mounts will do as well but what I've noticed is if I do too much of this with the plastic ones they wear out pretty quickly over time so I recommend getting one of these metal ones if you find yourself connecting your GoPro to a tripod often and the last thing you'll need is a Micro SD card now this particular card I have here from SanDisk is a 512 gigabyte card you do not need to have a card that big but you will want to have a card that's at least 64 gigabytes in size for a night Labs otherwise you may run out of space on that card and it would be frustrating to come back to your card and find that you only got part of the night laps so now that we've talked about the tools you need let's get into the setup section next so the first element of setup that you want to figure out is where will you be filming your GoPro night lapse so if your goal is to capture a lot of celestial objects including stars or the Milky Way you're going to want the darkest location possible if your nightlab's goal is to capture Urban lights and like Bridges and buildings in the night sky in a city then you'll want a location that has a great vantage point of that City so what you want to capture is going to determine the location that you want to select in this case I'm going to assume that most of you want to capture a great view of the stars and or the Milky Way so in order to do that you're going to want a reasonably dark location and the great thing is you don't have to guess on that there's some great websites out there two in particular that I'm going to mention today that will help you find a great site location for your GoPro night labs darksky.org and darksitefinder.com are the two websites that I recommend checking out to find a great place to do a GoPro night lapse now the first website darksky.org will have a listing of certified dark sky locations in your area so if you go and look at the map you can look and see which location is nearby meet that threshold a lot of times you're going to find that these are state parks or national parks basically places that are far away from any major urban areas and do not have any man-made light pollution interfering with them generally most people will have at least one of these locations within approximately an hour of where they live in darksite finder.com is a great place to check if your exact location meets the criteria so the criteria is not a set in stone as far as what constitutes a good dark sky and what doesn't but generally if your location is dark yellow or darker so if it's dark yellow light green dark green blue or purple you're probably going to be able to get a pretty good night lapse of stars and the Milky Way in the sky if you're anything less than dark yellow like a light yellow orange or red it's going to be a lot more difficult to get a night lapse it doesn't mean it'll be impossible but what you'll find is you'll be able to capture some of the brightest stars and planets or the moon but you won't be able to see some of those more faint features such as the Milky Way or some of those less Bright Stars so what I recommend if you want to get a good view of the night sky and you live in a location that's light yellow orange or red I recommend finding a friend or a location that's in that dark yellow or darker it's going to make your night laps a lot better and if you look at that map of the entire us there are plenty of areas that are dark yellow green blue or purple most people have one of these within approximately half an hour of where they live now once you've selected a tentative location or locations I do recommend checking those out in the daytime if it's your first time filming a night lapse there the daytime is going to allow you to look around and kind of pick out an exact site so at that location you may want some type of object in the foreground and you also may want to select a specific place where you want to set that up generally you're going to want your tripod and your camera in a place that's not publicly accessible because if you're leaving it there all night somebody could walk off with it and I don't recommend leaving it unless you're on private property or someplace where you're camping out like in the woods and you've got it right there near your tent I don't recommend leaving it otherwise like at a state park in a public place along a road or a parking lot because you might come back in the morning and find that it's gone you don't want that to happen to your GoPro or your equipment so when I do my night lapses I do a combination of filming them on private property sometimes that of a friend or family member and then I sometimes do it with a pitched outside my tent like if I'm backpacking or camping in the woods those are all great options that I have found work well so once you have that site selected it's time to set up your tripod and your other equipment now I recommend doing this setup allowing yourself at least an hour or so to get everything in place before it gets dark you don't want to be fumbling and trying to set it up in the dark with a light it can be very difficult to do so the first thing you're going to want to do is you're going to want to get your tripod set up so we're going to extend our tripod here and you of course do not have to do this to the full height you can keep it short like this if it's windy or even a little bit Breezy you may want to keep it as short as possible because the wind is less likely to knock it over that's a helpful tip if you're filming on a windy night once you have your tripod set up here you're going to want to make sure you have your GoPro Mount connected to the mounting plate once you have your GoPro mount on you're going to want to mount your GoPro on it and of course make sure you have your USB passthrough door or case on your GoPro before mounting it and you can leave the battery in your GoPro when you're using the external battery pack it's not going to care if you have the battery in there or not as long as you're using the one that I have from anchor if you're using a different brand you may have to remove the battery to power the GoPro but do keep in mind that if your cable becomes loose or disconnected in the night your GoPro will cut off instantly if you don't have a battery in there in the case of this anchor one if you have the battery in here it's going to charge that battery to 100 first and then it's going to continuously power it so if your anchor external battery pack ran out of power in the night or if the Cable became disconnected your GoPro would still keep going for a couple hours that's another reason I recommend that power pack is it's going to set you up for success we're gonna get our GoPro connected here after you have your GoPro connected you're going to want to connect to the external power pack all you have to do is plug this into the USBC port make sure your cable is connected here as well and then what I love about this specific tripod is it's got this handle right here so what you can do is you can slide this in here and it's going to stay in place really well now you don't have to use a specific tripod that I use you can use a different one but if you don't have this handle here I recommend using some rubber bands or some bungee cords to hold this power pack in place as if this slips and Falls more than likely the cable here is going to become disconnected or it's going to rip it off the GoPro and it could damage your GoPro you don't want that to happen so make sure to secure this on your tripod whether that be in the handle here or whether you use rubber bands or bungee cords so once you have everything set up you're ready to start filming your night lapse now there is a certain art to creating a night lapse in one of those elements is how you place your camera so what I mean by that is generally you're going to want some type of foreground object in your night lapse that helps give context to the night lapse and what's happening so in some cases that could be a mountain Horizon in other cases you may have your camera pointed up at the sky underneath a tree and you may have part of that tree in your frame now when you do that I recommend not having any more than approximately one quarter to one-third of your frame taken up by your foreground object that's because you want plenty of perspective of the sky in your night laps you know you want to be capturing mostly stars and the Milky Way but when you have that foreground object or some other type of object that's in part of your frame it helps show the rotation of the Stars much better and it looks a lot better now in the case of this site here today I have plenty of trees around me but mostly Open Sky so what I'm going to do is I'm going to have the GoPro pointing upwards here and I'm going to have a little bit of one of these trees in one side you'll see that more so when we capture this night lapse and we edit the photos as to how I set it up so in the next section of this video I'm going to run through the basic best settings that I recommend to capture an amazing night lapse now these best settings you're likely going to want to program into your GoPro before you get out in the field and the great thing is once you've programmed those settings into your GoPro they'll be there ready for you to use as soon as you power on your GoPro [Music] so the first thing we'll want to do is we'll want to navigate time lapse mode and when we're in time lapse mode you're going to want to make sure you're in night lapse mode specifically down here at the bottom once we're in night lapse mode we're going to click on that and we're going to go right here where it says night lapse you're going to click on the pencil icon to the right and once we're in this mode you're going to want to make sure your format is set to photo now you can do a video night lapse but I strongly encourage you to do a photo night lapse you're going to get a lot better results in the photo mode versus the video mode and you're going to have a lot more flexibility later on when editing I am going to show you the best settings for video mode today but again I strongly recommend using the photo mode so we're going to start with photo mode first after you have format a photo you're going to next want to set interval of Auto for shutter speed if you have a fully dark sky you're going to want to have that at 30 seconds if it's a full moon I recommend having 15 seconds if it's a half moon or something close to a half moon I recommend 20 seconds for output you definitely want to have raw raw is going to be those dot GPR GoPro photos and those are going to give you a lot more flexibility when editing later on and you will also get the jpeg side by side but the Raw photos preserve the full amount of data in them and you can really bring that out during the editing process later on scheduled capture you'll want to keep that off EV comp will not apply in this mode for the white balance I recommend having that at 3200k or 4000k but 3200k is my favorite for night lapses and you can always change this when you're editing later on but do make sure to set it to a value don't keep it at Auto the iso Min and Max are two of the most important settings and those are going to depend on where you are filming so if you're filming in an area that has that dark yellow or further up on the scale like green blue or purple you're going to want to have the isomin and Max most of the time set to 800. if it's a really really dark sky you could do 1600 but the problem with 1600 that I've seen on a lot of GoPros is you start to get hot pixels and hot pixels are those random blue red or other pixels that you can tell are just dead pixels in there when the stars are moving you can see these stationary objects in your time lapse and those don't look good so generally I have found that if you keep the isomin and Max set to 800 you have a lot less hot pixels or no hot pixels at all so even with a fully dark sky you can use 1600 for the iso mid and Max but I recommend doing 800 and the trade-off is you just have to brighten those photos a little bit more later on when editing but generally those have all the detail preserved and you can bring that out now if you are in an urban area where there's a decent amount of light and you're like a light yellow orange or red on that scale on the map then I recommend keeping this set to no higher than 800 in probably even 400 is going to work for you for the night laps for sharpness you want to keep this at low and color you want to keep that at flat and the shortcuts down here will not apply you do not need to touch any of those for a night lapse so next thing I'm going to show you is the video mode in case you want to use it so for the video mode you're going to change format here from photo to video and for resolution I recommend doing the 4K or the 4K 4x3 if you do the 4K it's going to be the 16x9 resolution it's going to be ready for you to export and share but if you do the 4K 4x3 it's going to give you a little more cropping flexibility for your finished product so either one is fine but in general if you're going to do the video mode you're probably going to want to stick with the 4K for the lens I recommend selecting wide is going to give you the most perspective in View and you can always remove that fish eye later on if you desire to do so for format it's of course going to be video interval you want to keep it at Auto shutter you're going to want to set that to 30 seconds if it's a really dark sky and then if you have the full moon or at least a partial Moon you're probably going to want to do 15 to 20 seconds so if you're filming roads Bridges buildings in a big city and showing how the lighting changes overnight video mode is probably going to work for you because you're going to have a lot lower shutter here of probably a couple seconds and that's going to work pretty well for scheduled capture that will not apply here you can keep that sector off for duration you want no limit for timer you can turn that to off for Zoom you can keep that at 1X you do not want to do any zoom on this camera as it would be digital zoom and it will reduce the quality of your video the protein settings are going to matter most on your video night laps for bitrate you definitely want to make sure that's set to high you want to get the highest quality product for Ev comp that's going to not apply for white balance you're going to want to make sure to set that down to 3200k for ISO Min and Max the same rules are going to apply as with the photo mode if you have a really really dark sky you could do 1600 but you risk hot pixels so I recommend doing 800 for the Min and 800 for the max for sharpness you could set this to low or medium but I do recommend low low gives you the best results for night lapses and you can always add some sharpness back later on when editing for color I recommend doing either natural or flat Flat's going to give you a little more flexibility to add colors back and saturation when you're editing and the shortcuts down here will not apply [Music] all right so now that it's getting close to dark we need to get our GoPro and tripod set up out here and get that night lapse rolling [Music] foreign so for tonight's night laps we're going to have that camera pointing straight up and down that lens is going to be pointed straight to the sky we of course want to make sure we've cleaned it off first I've got it all plugged in we're going to double check recommend checking to make sure the charging symbols lit up there that means we've plugged it in when we get in position we're going to make sure that thumb screw is nice and tight I'm going to make sure the tripod is nice and sturdy we've got our external battery pack right here and I've got the tripod on the shortest mode it can go on because there is a little bit of a breeze today and I want to have that where it's not going to fall over so once we have everything to go we're going to look above make sure we have the setting that we want should we do and we're of course going to get down underneath here and make sure the perspective that we're seeing is what we like we've got everything set in the frame as we like it then we're going to hit start the time lapse going so every 30 seconds tonight that GoPro is going to take one individual Raw and jpeg photo at the same time then it's going to go another 30 seconds collecting all of the info it's going to take another shot all right it's morning time now I'm going to get down here and we're going to cut this off when you hit the record button it's going to keep going until the last photo reaches zero and then it's going to stop all right so now that we've filmed our night laps we need to get our GoPro connected to our computer and we need to copy those files to our computer so that we can edit them now if you did do the video mode night lapse I'm going to show you those settings next first we're going to do the photo mode and I'm going to show you how to edit those Raw photos and create a night lapse from those so first thing we want to do is we want to plug in our GoPro using the USB to usb-c cable once we plug it in we want to power it on and once we've powered it on we should see it pop up on our computer here in a moment so in today's case I'm using an Apple computer to demonstrate this but the steps are all going to be the same whether using Windows or Apple except for the part where you navigate to find your files at the beginning it's going to look a little bit different of course on Windows versus Mac OS now if you find your computer tends to be buggy when you plug in your GoPro via the USBC cable then I recommend one of these right here this is a USB adapter that has both SD and micro SD slots on it and I like to use this personally because I can connect this into my Apple computer my Windows computer and it works each time every time so for today's video I'm going to show you that as well so if we go that route we're going to take the micro SD card out of the GoPro we're going to plug it into the USB drive right here and then we're going to hook this up to the computer after we've plugged it in we're going to see the drive show up here so it's going to be called Untitled and I'm going to navigate to this DCIM folder so I've got a couple different night lapses on here and what I'm gonna do is I want to do the one that I did most recently which is the demonstration that I showed you so where it says search here we're going to dot GPR and we're going to click on DCIM that way it shows just what's on this drive so the night lapse that I did it went from the night of August 1st to August 2nd so we're gonna want all of the GPR files which GPR is the raw files we're going to want to copy the ones from when it ended to when it started so I'm going to hold down shift and I'm going to drag down here and I'm going to go all the way back to August 1st when I started this one which was at eight o'clock I'm going to right click we're going to click copy and we're going to make a new folder here in the desktop we're going to call it night lapse one and then we're gonna right click on this folder we're going to click paste and all the files are going to paste into that folder and there's about 16 gigabytes of files so like I said 64 gigabytes is generally the size I recommend for micro SD card that gives you a little bit of leeway in case you have some other files on there this one you have to remember these are only the raw files so if we had the jpeg file size totaled into this too it would be pretty close to 32 gigabytes but 64 gives you that extra buffer room in case you have other files on there or in case you're doing a particularly long night lapse or time lapse and if you consider if we had the interval of 15 seconds it would have been twice the amount of photos first 30 second interval we had so if we had done that then the file size would have been approximately 33 gigabytes so 64 gigabytes at minimum is what I recommend for your micro SD card so these files are going to finish copying here fairly quickly and then once they finish copying we're going to go to the next step all right so our files are almost finished copying here they're going to be done in a moment here all right now that they've finished copying the next thing we want to do is we want to open Adobe Lightroom classic now I strongly encourage you to use Lightroom classic the principles of editing that I'm going to show you you can use in any photo editing software that has those options Lightroom classic is very friendly to anybody who wants to edit time-lapse photos it makes it super easy and it saves you a lot of time so I'm going to show you how to do this in Lightroom classic if you decide to use something else like I said a lot of these settings will still apply but there's obviously going to be different steps if you don't use Lightroom classic so once Adobe Lightroom classic opens we're going to go up here to file and we're going to select import photos and video and we're going to navigate to our folder right here in the desktop and we're going to make sure all 1303 photos are selected and then we're going to click import so as you'll see here like I mentioned earlier the first several photos are going to be fully white and that's because there was Daylight going on after Sunset and before it got fully dark and when you have a shutter speed set to 30 seconds it's going to capture any light that's there and that much light is going to overwhelm the sensor and then of course as these previews load we will see a bunch of photos at the end of the night laps that are white as well so what I recommend doing is I recommend deleting a bunch of these white ones typically as you start to load out look and as you can see photo 90 here 89 to 90 start to show some definition of what's in the frame so what I like to do is I like to usually delete up to a couple photos before that I like to leave a little bit of buffer for the intro and the outro but not too much and we have a bunch of white ones at the end too so if you look here like around a thousand and eight there's still some little bit of definition of that tree so just like with the intro I want to leave a little bit of outro so I'm going to click on one zero two one hold down shift then I'm going to go all the way to the end 12 18. selected that I'm going to right click I'm going to click remove photos and I'm going to remove from Lightroom so now we have a good approximate thousand photos that we can work with for the night laps so now that these are importing and we're just loading the previews for the editing process we want to select one that's near the middle because we kind of want average lighting for the night laps so I'm going to go down here and since it's about a thousand photos I'm going to select right here around 500. I'm going to double click and that's going to load our main photo so it's going to give the loading down here because the initial preview had not loaded yet for that photo now it's important to note that the photos you get for your night laps they're initially going to look pretty dark and you're probably going to think oh no I did something wrong why didn't this work he gave me all the settings Why didn't mine come out like this don't panic that is normal because there's a lot of detail that's preserved in here that you just can't see we have to bring out that detail from the raw photo so what I'm going to do to make this a little easier to show you all the settings is I'm going to load one of my presets so I have a safe preset for anytime I do a night lapse that has ISO of 800 and shutter speed of 30 which this night lapse was so watch what happens when I click on this preset it's going to apply and you're going to see a big difference in a moment look at that look at all the detail that was there in that photo that we couldn't see until it was brought out so now that I've applied that preset I'm going to show you under the develop tab all of the settings that I changed for this so first of all the temp intent settings I left alone because I had my white balance set to 3200 and I like it that way the exposure I brought it up to 0.75 the contrast I left at zero the highlights I did about plus 30. the Shadows I did plus five the whites I had about plus 30 there it's 31 to be exact the blacks I brought it up ever so slightly to plus two under the present settings the only change I made was Clarity I brought that up to plus 10. tone curve I did not change anything under that that's all of the default settings under the hsl color tab if you click on saturation you can see some of the colors I brought out a little bit here so for this particular night lapse I brought orange yellow and green all up to around about 30. because I like how that works with the colors here I really like that a lot the aqua I left that alone and the blue I left it alone the sky already has a lot of those colors in it it doesn't really do anything for the night laps to bring out more of those and then the purple and the magenta I brought up to about plus 40 on both of those because as you'll see when we move this along a lot of those Milky Way colors are more of that magenta and purple and I really like how that looks to bring those out the color grading I didn't do anything under that tab the detail tab is a pretty important one so under that one I brought the sharpening way up so if you remember for our for our sharp settings we did this on low so low is the lowest sharpening and the nice thing is you can bring out a lot of that detail and in this case bringing up the sharpening really helps enhance a lot of these stars and details in this night lapse and then the radius I drag this over to about two here I I find that tends to work best for night lapses for the detail for this one I brought to about 50. the masking I have that at zero for the noise reduction this is a particularly important setting so for noise reduction we want to bring this way up it makes a huge difference it Smooths it out really nicely the detail I have that about 63 I like it for this particular one and that tends to work best for anywhere I do the iso of 800 and the shutter speed of 30 seconds because that's typically going to be a fully dark sky contrast I bring that up just a little bit to about 16. and then for noise reduction for color same thing bring it all the way up to 100 if it wasn't at 100 it's going to look really bad there as well so bring that up to a hundred and for the detail I usually want that about middle of the road for color uh somewhere around 50 and then smoothness we want that up to 100 we want it nice and smooth and then down here on the lens correction I like to select the remove chromatic aberration and then I select enable profile correction when you select the enable profile correction it corrects the lens settings so I had it on wide it makes it a lot better there's less of that fisheye when you click it it auto corrects it now the default setting for this is Distortion would be here at 100 but I find that that crops my frame a little too much so I typically bring it down to about 60. so there is still going to be a little bit of fisheye there but for night laps that's not really a big deal that looks pretty good as a night lapse so I'm going to keep it there and those are the settings that I change on each of these photos alright so after we've applied that to one photo kind of neat to look at the photos on each side of that to see just how much of a difference that makes it's huge so this is the big key where Lightroom saves us a lot of time you want to hit command a in the case of Mac or control a in the case of Windows and what you'll see is it selects all of the photos down here in your timeline and you want to right click on the photo that you edited which in this case is number 500 on our photos here and you want to right click and go to develop settings and select sync settings it's going to show you all of the settings that you could have possibly changed on here and you're going to click check all it's going to select all of these and then you're going to synchronize and when you synchronize up here it's going to say pasting settings it'll go pretty quickly and then what it's going to do is it's going to take all of the settings you changed on this one photo it's going to apply them to all of the photos in your night Labs that saves so much time and it works great in Lightroom classic what we want to do is we want to export the nightlabs photos for the image format you want to make sure it's jpeg color space you want to make sure it's srgb quality you want to make sure it's set all the way to 100. once you've applied all those settings you're going to click export and it's going to say preparing to export now generally at this point I recommend going and Brewing yourself a coffee or doing something else because it's going to take a while so I'm not going to keep this recording I'm going to let this export finish and I will resume as soon as it's done all right so now that our photos have finished exporting we're going to go on to the next stage the next stage involves putting those individual photos into a video editing program and then exporting your finished product so for this demonstration I'm going to use Adobe Premiere Pro and I like Adobe Premiere Pro for the night lapses and time lapses because it's super easy to do in there now you can use other video editing software like DaVinci Resolve if you want a free one you can do iMovie Final Cut Pro any of those but I recommend using Premiere Pro because I find that Premiere Pro is the easiest software to use for night lapses and if you're not sure if it's right for you I definitely encourage you to do a trial with Premiere Pro to see if you like it Premiere Pro does have a bit of a learning curve but I still think it's one of the easiest video editing softwares to use once you get the hang of it so we're going to create a new project and I'm going to call this night lapse one and we're going to navigate to our location and we are going to select we're going to go to desktop we're going to select nightlabs one we're going to click choose then we're going to click create now that our project's created first thing we want to do is we want to go up here to file new and sequence we want to do a 29.97 because that's going to be the default for the night lapse with those photos and we want to make sure it's 3840 by 2160 because that is 4K and then all of these other settings we pretty much can leave alone down here you're going to click ok then next thing we want to do is we want to go up here to file and we want to do import and then we want to navigate make sure it's in our night lapse one folder we want to select edited and so here is a key setting to make sure you do properly you want to click the first photo but then you want to click down here under options and you want to select image sequence and what Premiere Pro is going to do is it's going to Auto detect it's a time lapse and it's going to import all of these photos in order in one file we're going to click import and there are the photos right there as you can see they're in a single file which is super easy to work with so we just drag this here onto the timeline and it's going to tell you it doesn't match the sequence settings and that's because the photos are a different resolution than the 3840 by 2160. so for now click keep existing settings and so as you can see this is very zoomed in so what we want to do for the scale is we want to go back to 69. when you select 69 that's going to fit it perfectly with the sideways resolution but then you're going to have some up and down resolution to work with I can go all the way to there before I get the black bar then I can go all the way down here before I get the black bar so generally what I recommend is I recommend putting it at a scale of 69 there and then down here at the bottom you can go to approximately 725 before it shows the black bars so in this case I want to leave a little bit of that tree at the top because that's our reference point to see the sky pivoting but I don't want to have a lot of the tree so I'm going to leave about this right here which in this case is 984. depending on what you have and where your subject is you might need to drag a little bit up and down but you won't have to drag side to side with 69 if you select that because 69 is exactly the proper resolution for side to side but since photos are shot in 4x3 resolution you have more to work with at the top and the bottom so once you've gotten a position the way you like it you want to go up here to sequence you want to render into out we're going to let this file render it's going to give us that nice smooth playback once we've rendered it and then we're going to let it finish rendering here all right so now that the rendering is finished we want to take a look here just make sure everything looks good and of course if you want to add some music from your favorite content provider for music feel free to do that so this looks really good we've got those low level clouds going over and then the Stars rotating in the background love how it looks so what we're going to do next is we're going to go up here and we're going to export so we're going to go file export media and what we want to do is we want to give it a name so in this case I'm going to call it night lapse one and we want to keep the format h.264 under video we want to click match Source we want to render at maximum depth and use maximum render quality and then down here for the bitrate encoding we want to do vbr 2 pass and we want to do our Target bitrate and our maximum bit rate also at 50 and then we're going to click export right here and the video is going to proceed to export and when it's done you're going to have your finished night lapse on your computer in a DOT MP4 format and finally I'm going to show you how to edit a night lapse that were shot in video mode now like I mentioned before when I was doing the settings I highly recommend doing night lapse in photo mode if you want the very best results you can do it in video mode but you're going to have a lot less editing flexibility so what you want to do here is you want to open your video editor in this case I'm going to show you on Adobe Premiere Pro but again if you're using a different video editor you can follow along a lot of these settings will still be the same they're going to be very basic for how to edit a video night lapse we're going to open Premiere Pro here and we're going to go to new project and we're going to choose the location we're going to choose night lapse one and we're going to give it a project name we're going to call it Video nightlabs One I'm gonna click create we're going to do file new sequence we're going to go over here to settings and we're going to make sure that it's 3840 by 2160. and we're going to set this to 29.97 we're going to hit OK and now we're going to import the video mode sample that I shot for a night lapse which on my desktop that's called gx015978 I'm going to click import and it's imported right here we're going to drag it to the timeline now in this case it's 4K 16x9 so we don't have to do any dragging around it's all set it's already there and as you can see it's pretty dark it doesn't show a lot of features so we want to go over here to lumetri color and the first thing we want to start with is this basic correction so what we want to do is we want to add some exposure it's going to help bring out some of the details so in this case I'm going to drag it up quite a ways I'm going to do something around 2 right here contrast we can mess around with that a little bit as well if you bring it down too much it gets pretty noisy if you bring it up too much it's going to take away a lot of the detail so I recommend generally having it pretty close to zero up just a little bit highlights you want to bring that up slightly to bring out some more of the detail that's preserved there but again when you bring them up you start to see a lot of noise like in this area and it doesn't look good so you don't want to go too high there so I'm going to leave those right around 30 for now Shadows you want to bring those up a little bit too but we don't want to bring those up too much so in this case I'm going to bring it up to about about 10 there whites I recommend bringing up ever so slightly in Blacks I don't recommend doing any changes on this I recommend leaving that at zero so under creative if you click there you have a few more options you can add a little bit more sharpness to it but I don't recommend adding too much because it'll quickly get pretty noisy here and saturation if you want to add a little bit since we did film it in flat you can add a little bit of color there and that is about it when it comes to editing a night lapse in video mode it definitely looks better than when we first imported it there's a lot more detail there with the Stars and a lot more of them show than did but like I said before with video mode it's going to mainly be the brightest features that you see in the sky you can only bring it up so much just because of the noise that you're gonna get if we take a look at it there it still looks pretty cool like I like that one the clouds look pretty neat there the noise isn't so bad that it's not still a good product and that's pretty neat seeing the Stars rotate through the sky there and every once in a while the cloud going through so I still like that it's good results and it still looks good in a project it's just not as detailed and as refined as the photo mode and of course something else you can do here if you wanted a quick night lapse that you can just use in a project to show the progression of time you can also change the speed so you could put this up to like 500 percent and it's going to make it into an eight second night lapse so if we play it now it's going to go really fast so yeah you have a lot of options there too for video night lapses generally they're going to be ones that you want to do fairly quickly most likely in your project you probably don't want like a 30 second night lapse so the video mode is great for that if you don't need the quality to be the very best it's great if you want to put it in a project to show the progression of time if you want to show Sunset to Sunrise an eight second night lapse in your project can be perfect that's what I recommend video mode for but if you want it to look really really good use Photo mode and then just like with the photo mode night lapse we're going to go up here to export we're going to click media and we're going to give it a name I'm going to call it video night laps one we're going to click on video here click match source go down to more select render at maximum depth you can use maximum render quality go down here to bitrate encoding select vbr 2 pass and put the target bit rate to 50. and the maximum bit rate to 50. and then click export and Premiere Pro is going to export your project you're going to be good to go so there you go there you have it that is my 100 A to Z complete guide on how to create amazing night lapses on your GoPro action camera you are now equipped with all you need to know in order to create amazing GoPro night lapses until we talk again happy goproing

Channel: Great Day For A Hike

Views: 83,321

Keywords: Great Day For A Hike, Milky way, Stars, astronomy, beginner guide, best settings, galaxy, gopro, gopro 11, gopro 12, gopro hero 10, gopro hero 11, gopro hero 11 black, gopro hero 12, gopro hero 12 black, night lapse, settings, setup

Id: Z4AFrcM4IIY

Length: 45min 9sec (2709 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 11 2022