A hyperlapse is basically a moving
time-lapse. It creates a very interesting impossible kind of camera movement and
it's actually not that difficult or time-consuming, so seeing us this is one
of my most requested tutorials, this week I want to show you how I shoot my hyperlapses. The first and most important step to shooting a great hyperlapse is
choosing a great location. Obviously you'll need a lot of open and preferably
flat space to move around in. You'll also need to find a location with a point for
you to focus your camera on and move towards. It's especially helpful if this
point is located on a vertical line. That vertical line is why you see so many
hyperlapses of buildings or towers. Having an additional line on the ground
leading up to that point like a sidewalk is also extremely helpful because you
can follow that line while you're shooting. The only gear you need to shoot
a good hyperlapse is your camera and your lens. You can use a tripod and
you'll get a slightly more stable shot but if you shoot it handheld it's
significantly faster. Using a wide-angle lens is definitely better for a
hyperlapse because it's going to make that camera motion appear a lot larger
and more dramatic. I won't be using my wide-angle lens because I broke it, so
there's that. A good hyperlapse does take some editing so you're going to want to
shoot in a pretty high resolution and quality so that you can have the
flexibility to edit in post. Make sure to enable your camera's guide lines and
center marker and if you have an in-camera level using that can
definitely be helpful. Before you start shooting you need to decide on a camera
motion for your shot. This could be moving towards your subject or away from
your subject, you could move past it or around it but the easiest one is
definitely just moving straight towards that subject. Next you'll need to figure
out how much you need to move and how many photos you need to take to complete
that camera motion. For every 24 photos you take you're going to have one second
of your final hyperlapse so if you want to shoot a four second long
hyperlapse you need to take 96 photos. This means that the more distance you
have to cover the more you'll need to move in between your shots. When I shot
this hyperlapse I wasn't covering too great of a distance so I only took one
step in between the photographs. However for this one I was covering a
significantly longer distance so I took I believe 10 steps between those photos.
Once you've done that you finally get to move on to actually shooting that
hyperlapse and the process itself is actually quite simple. All you need to do
is focus on that point, get your camera level, take a photo, and then take a step
forward and repeat. Making sure that you're moving in a straight line just
line it up, take a photo, step forward, take another photo, step forward, and keep
going for a long-ass time. Once you've taken all of your photos
we'll take those and play them rapidly together like a time-lapse or a
stop-motion animation. At this point after all that work and all that time
you can finally look back and just appreciate the wonderful hyperlapse that
you've created. Just kidding, it looks terrible and we have loads of editing
to do so let's do that. I'm doing my editing using a program called HitFilm
Express but if you use Premiere Pro you can still follow along with this
tutorial and achieve a very similar effect. Start off by importing all of the
photos for your hyperlapse as an image sequence, and if your software doesn't
allow you to import an image sequence then just go into the settings, change
the default image duration to a single frame, and then drag all of your pictures
onto the timeline and you can re-export that timeline and you'll be able to view
your hyperlapse as a video. It's basically like
stop-motion. Now that you've turned that group of photos into a single video it's
time to stabilize that shaky camera motion. Warp stabilizer can be quite
helpful and a lot of people use that for their hyperlapses but if that doesn't
work then there's a method that I prefer to use which is manual stabilization
using motion tracking. I know that sounds scary but just stay with me, it's really
not that bad. Using a two-point track, track the focal point of your hyperlapse
as well as another point in the image moves similarly. That's why it's really
good to have a vertical line as your subject, because having that second point
as another point on the vertical line will give you easily the best result
that you can have. If your second tracking point is in a completely
different part of the frame than your first one then you're going to get weird
warping and rotating effects when you stabilize your shot. So just make sure
you pick something that has a motion similar to that of your main points.
Once you've finished tracking both points use that two-point track to
stabilize the position and rotation of your clip and finally just add some
motion blur to the entire shot to create the illusion of that fast motion. At this
point if you did everything right you should be done for real and you should
be able to go back and just enjoy watching your hyperlapse. It really is
quite satisfying. Before this video ends I want to do something a little bit
differently this week to get you guys more engaged with this video and make
this channel more interactive. Just go out and, using the techniques that I've
discussed in this video, make a hyperlapse of your own and send it to me. And if you send me a hyperlapse that you've done
yourself I will include it and shout you out in a video not next week but two
weeks from now. I think this will be a great way to not only feature some of
your work on my channel in addition to my own but also to kind of allow me to
see how my tutorials are helping you or maybe not helping you and see any impact
that these videos are having on what you are creating. I'd love to make my
tutorials more of an interactive process so if you're interested in that go ahead
and send me something that you make using this video and I'll include it in
the video two weeks from now. But anyway that is all for this week's video I hope
you enjoyed it, learned something from it and if you did do feel free to show
your support by leaving a like on the video or even subscribing to my channel
I upload new filmmaking tutorials every single Saturday, keep creating and I'll
see you in the next one.
