Today, we’re continuing our exploration into shooting and processing time-lapse photography. In the last installment, we covered what time-laspe is, common styles shot with it and few programs used to merge the photos into a video. Today, we’ll explore your equipment options, how to setup your camera to achieve the best results, and how to have the most control over your time lapse by processing it in After Effects.
Equipment
First of all we need a DSLR camera, I personally suggest you to choose between Canon and Nikon. It is very important to have the option to shoot in RAW format because it gives you the opportunity to make significant changes later on in post-production. The megapixels are not as important since nowadays most of the cameras are 12 megapixels and above and this is more than enough. In most of the cases, you are going to down convert the footage to full HD 1920×1080. A final note regarding the camera, be sure it gives you full manual control over ISO , aperture, white balance and shutter speed. This is key when choosing a camera especially for time lapse purposes.
Choosing the right shutter speed
If you shoot fast moving objects like cars use slow shutter speeds like 1/10 or less in day time and 4-6 seconds exposure time in night conditions. This will make the fast moving objects blurry and recreate the feeling of fast moving objects, because if you shoot with a fast shutter the final video will look choppy and not realistic. If you shoot a time lapse of clouds, you can use 1/30 or 1/40 so the clouds are sharp enough and still a bit blurry if they are moving fast this will make the videos more organic and make them look like they are shot with a video camera instead of still camera.
Editing the pictures using Camera Raw and After Effects (advanced workflow)
Finally, it is time to edit all the images we shot for our time lapse. Here I am going to show you an advanced workflow between Camera Raw and After Effects in order to increase the quality of your final video. For this example, you can work both with RAW files or simple JPG files which can be opened and manipulated in Camera Raw. First of all, you need to open Adobe Bridge and set up some settings because in different versions the default settings can vary slightly. Open Bridge and go to File and choose Camera Raw Preferences…
Exporting the finished time-lapse from After Effects
It is time to export our finished time lapse. First, click on the bottom panel where you’ll see a timeline. Select it and go to Composition and choose “Make Movie.”
Then you need to click on the Output Module which says Custom: AVI to choose file format. A new dialog window will appear and from there you can choose your desired file format for export. I’m going to choose Quicktime because it is most comfortable for me…