(whooshing nighttime sounds) (alarm clock buzzing) (car starting) (driving noise) (rapid footsteps) (clicking of equipment) (silence) (soft insect sounds) (wind whooshing) (camera
taking photographs) - This week, I want to show you hands-on how to shoot the perfect time-lapse. So let's go back and do all of that again, but I'm tired as hell. So let's do sunset this time. All right, so before we head out, let's talk about the gear
that we're gonna be taking to use to shoot this time-lapse, starting out with the camera. It's not that important, which camera you use
to shoot a time-lapse, but every single camera has a slightly different
time-lapse feature. So it's important to know
what you're working with. If your camera's built in
time-lapse mode, isn't very good. You might have to use one of these. This is called an intervalometer, it's basically an
attachment for your camera that tells it to take
photos at certain intervals, like take a photo every two seconds. Different cameras also have different intervalometer inputs. So it's important to make
sure you get the right one to match with your camera. Then lens choice. I'm usually shooting wide for time-lapses, just to get the whole landscape. And I think if you're not sure exactly how you're gonna shoot, that's a good place to start and a good thing to go with. But it can also be really
cool to shoot with a telephoto lens and zoom in and get like a very focused part of the landscape and really center
in and compress that area and see exactly what's going
on in that specific area. So, really up to you but if
it's your first time-lapse, I'd recommend going wide. Then an ND filter to go on the lens and this is something that you
don't necessarily need for a time-lapse and I'm actually
not gonna be using to shoot my time-lapses, but it can be cool for getting certain
effects in a time-lapse like, if you want to
control the shutter speed and have, you know, the shutter speed, be very slow and show like
motion bore people walking around or water moving. That's where this can come in handy, but today we're not gonna be using it. And finally, a tripod. Yeah, this one's pretty self explanatory. (upbeat music) Another important thing to be
aware of before you actually go out to shoot is weather. Weather conditions are super
important for time lapses more than for pretty much anything else that you're gonna shoot. Perfectly clear conditions
with absolutely no clouds, aren't gonna give you much of
a time lapse during the day because you won't see those clouds moving, but having a perfectly clear
sky with no clouds is also exactly what you want for
shooting a time lapse of the night sky and seeing the stars. So it really depends on
exactly what you're shooting. Partly cloudy weather is
basically the old reliable for shooting a time-lapse because
you're gonna get those clouds moving throughout the image, but they're not gonna
completely cover the sky. So it's good for like sunsets
or really just any kind of daytime time-lapse, where you
want to see the clouds moving. But I would also tell you to
never rule out stormy weather for a time-lapse. Many of my favorite time-lapses
I've shot have been taken right after a storm or a really rainy day, because you can get some crazy
cloud conditions and lighting right after a storm. The
clouds are like unmatched. They just do really cool stuff
and have a lot of motion. So if you look at the
weather and you see that, it's probably gonna be like a rainy day. I wouldn't necessarily rule
out going out and shooting a time lapse anyway, but no matter what, just be aware of what you're
gonna be shooting in and what to expect. (relaxing music) In addition to keeping
an eye on the weather, take some time to research the location that you're shooting. Usually with landscapes, we're talking about this
big wide expansive area and this large composition so you need to understand what
you want the subject to be, what angle you want to shoot
it from and what spot you're gonna have to hike to, to
get it from that angle. I use a smartphone app called PhotoPills, that basically uses augmented
reality to let you see, where the sun is going to rise
and set where the Milky Way is gonna be at certain times
of day from a particular area. It's really cool and really helpful, especially for time-lapses. I'll leave a link to
that in the description, but I've already done all that research. So we can go ahead and
start hiking to the spot. (relaxing music) (car lock beep) That's a bear canister to put
food in and bear spray to have on you while you're hiking. Two very good things to have with you. If you're hiking somewhere
like North Carolina, where they're are a lot of bears. but while we hike out to the cliffs, I want to talk to you about
a few best practices for shooting time-lapses and
particularly what not to do. So what I'll sometimes see
people do is basically just set up their shot, hit record and record like
a 20 minute long video. And that is the cardinal sin
of shooting a time-lapse. I guess it's a little more
convenient at that moment when you're shooting, but it
takes longer to edit. And the result you get looks
a lot worse and also restricts you to the video limit of your camera, usually 20 or 30 minutes, which is not that long for a time-lapse. Instead to do a time-lapse, you should always shoot
photos at intervals. So instead of recording a video, you have your camera take
a photo every two seconds, five seconds, 20 seconds, whatever, but there are a lot of benefits
to that you can record for a much longer time while still
usually having a smaller file size in the end. And it's also a much
better file to work with. It's a lot more detailed. You just get a cleaner image
and you have a lot more control over it in post. (gentle music) Also this whole area by the
trail is absolutely covered in moss and ferns. Which
is great, I love ferns, maybe get some ferns for my room. (relaxing music) This is just a little notch
off to the side of the trail. This isn't even the view, but sick though. (relaxing upbeat music) Alright the view, this
isn't the view though. We're going over there,
so back on the trail. This is my favorite part
of the trail, just slicing. Right through that rock. Sick. Loving the views out here. So now that we've made sure
you're shooting still images for your time-lapse, go ahead and make sure
that they're RAW photos and not JPEGs. I know a lot of you are
gonna be like, hell no, no way I'm gonna fill up my
SD card with 3,000 RAW images, but I promise you it's worth it. It's the difference
between this time lapse and this time lapse. JPEG, RAW, JPEG, RAW. Shooting in a raw image format gives you that extra flexibility that
you need, for something like a time-lapse because you're
shooting over an interval of maybe several hours, even possibly
more than a full day. So things change a lot. Lighting changes, white balance changes, and you need the flexibility
to adjust it in post to what's right. That could mean bringing more
detail out of a blown out sky or raising up the shadows to
capture all that nighttime detail of the stars. And if you shoot those 3,000
RAW images and then your time-lapse just sucks. You can just format your card
and pretend it never happened, but I promise you it's worth it to shoot in a RAW format. So you have that flexibility
to get the best shot possible. Also isn't this campsite cool.
Coming backpacking here in a few weeks, we might have to camp out here. (gentle music) Sick view huh. The temperature on this trail. Astronomical. It is way too hot. Seriously, though. It's hot and humid as hell out here. Mountains are supposed to be cold. We're gonna trudge on though, make it up to the top. Wait until you see this view. So you've made it and you're
ready to set up and shoot your time-lapse. But there's one
very important step first. And that's to take a minute
and take in the sick view. I'll give you 30 seconds. (gentle electric music) (electric music intensity building) Time's up. All right. Now let's talk, setting up the shot. First composition. It's important to have a subject
for a time-lapse because it gives you something to focus
on in a frame that's gonna be usually filled pretty
much with moving elements. In my case, that's gonna
be this guy right here, this little peak that stands
out in the background of the shot. Furthermore, because of
the structure of this Ridge, we're gonna have the leading lines, leading up to that subject, which will give the viewer
something to guide them to that point in the frame. I'll also use PhotoPills
to set up the composition because I want to know where the sun and the stars are gonna be when that information is necessary. I'm not gonna be staying here
long enough to see the stars, but I could see exactly
where the sun is gonna set. In this case, I can use my eyes and deduce that the sun is gonna be setting over there. Alright, so let's talk camera settings. I would try and go for a nice
neutral exposure to start with. If you blow out the sky, you're not gonna be able
to see the clouds moving, which kind of defeats the
whole point of a time-lapse in most cases. But if you completely crush the shadows and only have the sky exposed properly, you're gonna have like a
weird silhouette effect. And you might as well just
point your camera up to the sky. You can make sure you get a
nice even exposure and don't lose the highlights or the
shadows by looking at the light meter on your camera's LCD. You should have a little bar,
at the bottom of your camera screen that has some numbers on it. Usually from negative
two or negative three. Up to positive two or positive three. So just try and get that at zero. And that's a nice even
exposure. If it's on two, then you're gonna be too
bright and losing the detail in the highlights. And if
it's on negative two, you're gonna be too dark and losing detail in the shadows. It's also probable that your
exposure will change throughout the duration of your shot. So you need to know the three
different modes that you can use to set exposure
throughout the time-lapse, Manual, shutter priority
and aperture priority. If you're on fully manual mode, then the exposure won't change
at all from shot to shot. It's gonna stay completely consistent, which isn't good for most time-lapses, but there are a few kind of
special situations where you might use it. Like if you want to have
both the shutter speed, be very slow and the
aperture be very wide open. Then you could use an ND
filter and use that to adjust the exposure, but that's a very rare case. So for most time-lapses, you're gonna want to use
either shutter priority or aperture priority so that your
camera adjusts the exposure to keep it consistent throughout the shot. In shutter priority, your camera's gonna keep
the shutter speed completely consistent and adjust the
aperture and sometimes ISO to keep the exposure consistent. The issue with that is that you
can only change the aperture so much. There's quite a limit to it. It might stop. If you're
using an f/1.4 lens. then your aperture, once it gets to f/1.4, it's not gonna go any lower. So if you're shooting maybe a
sunset and it gets dark enough that your cameras all the way
down to f/1.4 and it needs to brighten the shot. It's gonna start bumping up
that ISO, introducing grain into the image. That's
why for time-lapses, as you generally want to
go with aperture priority, this way it keeps the aperture consistent and adjust the shutter
speed throughout the shot, to compensate for change and exposure and keep it consistent. And what's good about that is
that your shutter speed can basically go either
way, almost infinitely. It can go all the way from like, a full 60 second long shutter, up to like 1/5000th of a second. You have a lot of range. So you can go from very
bright, to very dark. And your camera's gonna be
able to maintain that exposure throughout the shot, without
changing the ISO at all. There are some cases where
that change in shutter speed could be a bit of an issue
in your shot. For example, in this time-lapse I
shot in New York City. You can see that as it gets darker, the shutter speed lowers and
the water gets a lot smoother, but in most cases, this is perfectly fine. And it definitely, definitely beats having
a grainy time-lapse. Also, I'm like shooting this A-roll for the tutorial right now. Talking about camera settings
and I'm like on a cliff. Like one slide and I'm done. Should probably go shoot the
next part somewhere else. So this is my go-to time-lapse camera. It's the Panasonic Lumix G7. This camera actually
stays in my camera bag. In addition, to this main
camera, the Canon EOS R, because it's time-lapse mode is so good, you can do everything in camera. You just set the interval,
the shutter speed, how many photos you want
to take, it's perfect. This camera on the other hand,
despite costing four times as much, as this Lumix G7, has a terrible built-in time-lapse mode. The shutter speed is really limited. The intervals that you can
shoot at is really limited. It's just not good in most cases. So that's why you have
to use this little guy, an intervalometer, which basically tells your
camera to take X number of photos at any given interval between the photos. You can do some other stuff with it too. Like you can tell your camera
to start shooting at a certain time. Like if you don't want
to start yet, you can say, start shooting in two
hours and it'll do that. But we're just gonna be
focusing on the interval and the number of shots today. So
have a look at your cameras built in time-lapse
mode, see if it's sucks. And if it does then see if
you'll need one of these. And if you get an intervalometer, make sure you get the right
one for your camera because different cameras have
different inputs for these. So you don't want to get one
that won't work like this one for Canon won't work on
this Panasonic camera. So let's start out by
setting the interval. So we're just gonna navigate
over to interval at the top, press set, then navigate over
and set the number of seconds. If you want to set over a full minute, you can set one minute right there, but we're just gonna use the seconds. I'm gonna go with four
seconds for this particular time-lapse, then just hit, set to lock that interval in
and then move over one to the right, to the number of shots. And I would just set this to
infinity. Most of the time, that's gonna be fine. I mean, in some cases you might want to take
specifically 400 photos, to save like space on your SD card. But most of the time you can
just set it to infinity and turn the camera off when
you're done shooting the time-lapse. And when you're ready, just hit that power button
again, one time and it'll start shooting at intervals. Really easy nifty little device to use. I'm sure it looks sick on camera, but there's no way you can see how massive this is in person. It's wild. And now time to get to editing
file organization is the first step. And it's pretty important
for editing time-lapses. As you can see here, I've got one folder that has
all the stuff for my time-lapse in it and nothing else.
If we open up that folder, we can see I've separated
out the RAWs from the JPEGs. Now you don't have to shoot JPEGs. I shoot both RAW and JPEG for each photo. So I have that smaller JPEG preview. You don't have to set
your camera up to do that. That's just what I prefer to do. You can just shoot the RAWs. I'm also gonna create a
third folder in here and just call it "processed" that way. Once we edit this time-lapse in Lightroom, we can store all of the processed, fixed up photos in this folder for when we import them into Premiere. The most important thing is
just that you've got a folder with your time-lapse in it
and nothing else just gonna make your life a whole lot easier. Once we get into Lightroom and Premiere. Now I'm just gonna open up Lightroom and hit Command + Shift + I, to import the photos for our time-lapse. Just navigate to that folder
that has all your RAW photos in it, select them all and hit import. Then wait, really quick while
we're importing these photos. I just wanna specify that
this crazy vignette that you might notice around the edge
of the photos is from the lens that's cause I'm using a crop
lens on a full frame setup. So just don't mind that, just ignore it. All right. So now that we've imported
all 1,489 photos for this time-lapse we can start to edit
these. Just looking at this, we can see that I exposed for
the sky to keep as much detail as I could in the sky. So I'm gonna start by bringing
up the shadows to bring some of that detail out and
then we can see it's still pretty dark. So I'm gonna bring the exposure up, just to get it back to where
it should be. And then finally, we've lost a bit of detail
in the sky by doing that. So I'm gonna bring the
highlights back down. Finally looking at the
sun, we've got this weird purple effect in the
white part of the sun. So I'm just gonna go bring the
whites up, to fix that just a bit while keeping that detail
in most of the highlights as we can see, we brought back a
lot of detail in this image. Then I'm just gonna
adjust the white balance. Usually I just go with auto,
Lightroom is pretty good about figuring out the white balance,
that an image should be, you can almost always just rely on that. Another thing I'll usually do is a little bit of noise reduction because with a time-lapse, you can tend to see a bit
of grain in the shadows, especially if you're exposing
for a long time and kind of letting that grain pile up
throughout that several second exposure. So I'm just
gonna in, noise reduce, just a little bit so we
can get rid of some of that grain. I like how this frame looks but we do have to keep in mind that since this is a time-lapse, there's a tendency for things
to change throughout the clip. So the last frame, is probably gonna look pretty different from this one. So how do we make sure that this is gonna look good on both the first frame and the last frame and everything in between? Well, I'm just gonna
right-click on this first frame, go to develop settings and
then copy our settings. And then I'm gonna go
to the very last frame of the time-lapse, select it, and then paste
them onto that frame. As you can see, it
looks good here as well. So I'm just gonna go ahead and select all the photos
in here, right-click, go to develop settings
and hit paste settings. And that's gonna paste that
configuration that we made at the beginning onto everything. So I didn't have to on
this particular clip, but what I would normally do, if there was a lot of difference, from the first frame to the last, is paste those settings
onto the last one, adjust, then paste them back onto the
first adjust and go back and forth until I get something
that works for both. There is a program you can
use called LRTimelapse, that'll allow you to dive in even deeper and kinda change these
settings throughout the shot. But frankly, I have no idea how to use it, and I didn't want to go quite
that hard for this tutorial. And instead show you something
that all of you can do to get a close enough effect. That's still gonna be a really
good time-lapse in almost every single case, but if you're doing something crazy, like shooting like a multiple
day time-lapse or something, that could be something
worth looking into. Also pasting these
settings onto everything in Lightroom, takes
like a really long time. Like you might as well, just go out and shoot another
time-lapse while you wait. Finally, once we're done, we're just gonna hit Command + A once again to select everything, then hit Command + Shift + E to export all of these. For the export location, we're gonna choose that
processed folder that we made earlier so that we can have all
of these in their own folder for when we import them into Premiere. Then under file naming, you are gonna want to rename all of these and give them a sequential name, just so that we can import
them into Premiere later on. So I'm gonna hit rename,
then use some custom text, just call it time-lapse,
it doesn't really matter. Then just click export and it's gonna export all
those images sequentially into that process folder, so that we can easily bring them into Premiere and finish
editing our time-lapse. Now let's open up Premiere. I'm just gonna create a new project, call it, screen recording. Sorry to break the
fourth wall a little bit, but that's what this is. And then to import our time-lapse, I'm just gonna double-click
in the media bin and navigate to that processed folder that we saved our time-lapse in. But these are JPEG images. How do we import these
into Premiere as a video? Well, we're just gonna click on the first one in the
folder, hit options, and then check off image
sequence and hit import. And it's gonna import those images each as one frame in a video. Now you can finally just watch
your time lapse and enjoy it. Be proud of yourself and what you created. It's a good part of the
process and you're done. Now, you've imported that into Premiere and you can edit it as if it were any other clip in Premiere. Finally, one plugin that
I do occasionally use on time-lapses is called Flicker Free, which basically just removes
that subtle flicker that you can sometimes get when
you're shooting a time-lapse. I rarely ever use it, but
sometimes it can come in handy. Like for this shot, I had like a pretty noticeable
flicker throughout the shot. So I used to Flicker Free and it smoothed that out, but it's definitely an optional
part of the process that you won't usually have to deal with, but we've officially reached
the end of this tutorial. I hope you've enjoyed this one, learned something new from it. And if you did, and you do go out and shoot a time-lapse of your own and use it in one of your own videos or posts on Instagram or whatever, tag me in it. I'd love to see it. I love seeing you guys
using these techniques, in your own work and taking something
away from these videos and actually applying
it and practicing it. So I'd love to see that but
if you enjoyed this one, feel free to share your support, putting a like on the video, sharing it with your friends or even subscribing to my channel. I upload new videos just like
this every single week at the moment, but that's all for this week. Keep creating and I'll
see you in the next one. My time-lapse is still exporting.
