Timelapses, part 2 - Final Cut Pro Tutorial

- [Nick] Hi welcome to Final Cut Pro 10 Weekly, I'm Nick and Jeff's not here this week. We're going to talk about working with time lapses part two. Why part two? Because we covered part one last week. We're specifically focusing on video time lapses. In this week's movie we're going to focus on still camera time lapse. We're going to look at setting up a project, changing the still length or the default length of stills when brought into a project and play around with the project size cause most notably your actually filming still camera time lapses so that you have the full resolution quality of the raw clip. So you can scale them up or scale them down and play with project size as you see fit. And if your time lapse for any reason has flicker and this could be due because your camera has those automatic settings, we're just going to talk about a quick way that you can deal with that. With a third party plugin available for final cut pro. Let's hop into final cut and take a look at what we have to work with. And in my Final Cut weekly library, I'm in my stills smart collection and I have all the stills that we'll be working with. This is another time lapse but this was recorded with stills in Washington DC. These are a series of JPEGs. Now originally these files were CR2 files and those are raw files from a Canon. I just chose to work with camera raw to deal with some of the color correction in that first stills and then I exported the JPEG for the purposes of this tutorial. So here are my stills and if I select one and then go to my inspector by pressing command four and going into my info inspector. I'll see that these are a weird frames size. Meaning that they're not really 1920 by 1080 where a 4k standard format there, a strange custom 5813 by 4119. So I want to go to the file menu and choose new project and here I'm going to choose time lapse two as the name, the video format I'm going to choose to be custom and under the custom resolution I'll make sure that our references or matches the frame size that I just saw. That was 5113 by 4119. So now we'll see that I have a timeline of those settings and I want to bring in every single one of the stills from my stills smart collection. I'll select the first one, press command A on the last one. This is just a great way to make sure that they come in in order. You'll see that they were numerically ordered, based on the way that they came out of bridge. I'll press E just to add them or pen them to the timeline. The timeline select if I press shift z, I'll get an overall view, and if I move to the beginning of the timeline; just notice that every still last for an entirety of four seconds. And to make every single still one frame, which it should be for this time lapse, I'm going to press command A, to select them all on the timeline. And with them all selected I'm just simply gone in, control D, to change the duration of each of these stills. And type in one for one frame, followed by the return or enter Key. Notice the timeline gets a lot smaller. I'll press shift z to fit them all to frame but because it's 30 frames per second, it's just under 13 second. And if I start to play now this time lapse we'll see that it's looking a lot more time lapse-ish. Again this isn't really a standard frame size so if you exported this; it's not 4k, it's not 1920 by 1080, you're going to run into a lot of problems of support. So ideally what I'd like to do is export this time lapse in a 1920 by 1080 resolution. So with this what I get is scaling power and to take advantage of this, I'm going to take all of these stills and place them into a compound clip. I'll select everything by pressing command A. And I'm going to go to the file menu and create a new compound clip and I'm going to call this time lapse. I'll choose okay. Everything in this project has that 5813 by 4119 resolution. Because it's in a compound clip what I can do is change the settings of my project. Under my final cut pro 10 weekly library, I'll go to my projects and I'll find my time lapse two project. So I'll just scroll down until I find that time lapse two project and here in the inspector, I'll see the settings for that project, which is still that strange resolution. I'll modify that, instead of a video custom setting, I'm going to choose a 1080p HD setting 1920 by 1080 that 2398 frame rate. I'll press okay and all of a sudden you don't really see a change in the size of this image, what I'd really like to do is see how much scaling power I have in this image. A great way to do that is to select that compound clip and go to the video inspector, it's that little video or clip icon up here to the top left hand side. I'll scroll all the way down, to where it says spacial conform and under type where it says fit, I'll change that to none. All of a sudden my shot's going to be a lot bigger. Because it's in such a smaller project, a 1920 by 1080 project, I can scale it up to this size that you see here and have no degradation in the quality of my video. I'm going to press shift T so that I can actually move around the position, you can see there my transform icon got selected. I'm just going to move this here over to the side and this is a little too zoomed in for me. I'll zoom out by pressing command minus and just look how big this video is. One thing I could do is grab on to a corner and just scale this down and reposition this video until I like how it looks. I'm just going to scale it down a little bit more. I can do the exact same thing here in the video inspector, I can scale it down manually using one of these parameters, position that upwards a bit so I can just get the majority of this action here into frame and I'm liking the way that looks and before I press done, I'll press the space bar just to preview this footage. And the time lapse is just looking a lot better. Last but not least, what happens if there is flicker in your time lapse and this might occur for a number of reasons. In my case there's not too much flicker, there might be some from the light but you might experience flicker I your time lapse because of the automatic setting of your camera. So if your camera has automatic white balance settings, automatic exposure, automatic focal control. The biggest problem is you're going to see a fluctuation in the way the light appears in your time lapse. So there is a filter double from Digital Anarchy called flicker free. Which is great for solving video as well as still time lapses inside the final cut, then I recommend that you check out. It might solve some of the flicker problems that occur within your time lapse. If you're looking to export we can export this project as a 1920 by 1080 H264 project using the share settings and then place this on Eddie videos sharing services that we want. I'm Nick, thanks for tuning in to Final Cut pro 10 weekly.