Refining the duration and frame rate of a time-lapse sequence with Adobe Photoshop

- Now that we've got the clip inside our Photoshop document, we need to do a little bit of additional processing. First off, realize that the files aren't actually embedded. This is just a link. When I save this Photoshop document, it's basically a set of instructions pointing to the folder where all the other images are. As such, I generally find it a good idea to save the Photoshop document near the same location as the original files. I'm going to choose file save as.

Let's store this in the same folder. We'll call this one VOF, for value of fire, one. I'll save this as a Photoshop document. When I click okay, the Photoshop file is written to disk. It doesn't actually contain anything, however, It just simply references these other files that are on the disk. One of the things you might want to control is the frame rate of your material. For example, we could adjust the timeline frame rate here to control what happens with the actual rendered file.

For this, I'll go to set time line frame rate. You can choose different pop-up lists. For example, I'm going to go with 23.976, for 24 P, which works quite well on the web. I'm going to click okay. You might notice that things changed down here in the timeline, but the duration didn't actually change. As such, you might want to select the video layer and then choose layer, video layers, and assign the frame rate. I'll go to interpret footage.

In this case, since we loaded the still frames in, I need to tell Photoshop how to handle those. I'm going to set this to also 23.976. Now, the two frame rates match. This gives us the ability to work with the material. We could adjust this and make things shorter or longer, but what's important here is that the two items match. Now that the sequence timeline is set to 23.976, and the footage is set to the same frame rate, I actually have three seconds worth of material.

That's because we imported 72 frames. If you're doing a real time lapse sequence, you'd likely import more frames than this. But remember, we reduced the amount of frames you had to download in order to follow along. Now that we've got the frame rates to match up, we're ready to move on to sizing the content.