From the course: Learning to Use Mirrorless Cameras
Shooting time-lapse movies
From the course: Learning to Use Mirrorless Cameras
Shooting time-lapse movies
- [Instructor] Shooting time lapse is a great way for creative expression. You could take moments and highly condense them. This is great to see the passage of time. Effectively, you're shooting a series of stills over a long period and then turning them into a movie, and most cameras have this feature built in, so you can do some pretty amazing things. Now, you might be able to create a movie file right in camera, or you might create a folder full of JPEG images or RAW files that you can assemble using a video editing tool like Premiere or After Effects. I'm using the GH5 here, and Panasonic has a great mode built right in. Be sure to check your camera's menu and see what options you find there. Let's go ahead and change the settings. I'll turn the dial to a dedicated time-lapse mode. And I actually need to get out of movie mode and into photography mode. So I'll just switch over to manual, which is my preference, so we don't have any unwanted changes over time. I want to lock in exposure and other settings. All right. Let's go ahead and check this out here. Power the camera back on. And we'll take a look at our choices. I see a setting here that says Start Time Now, Shooting Interval, one minute. Well, that may not be what we want, so we can actually dial that in. If I press the Menu button here, you see that we have options. So we can go in here and start to make an adjustment. I'm going to go ahead and have it capture 6K material. Let's go here to the Time Lapse and Animation menu, and I'm in Time Lapse Shot, but we can do other things like stop motion, which is a cool type of animation. I'll tell this to start now, but I'll set the shooting interval to be a little lower. I want this to capture a frame every three seconds. That'll speed things up nicely. If you think about that, what happens here is that every three seconds, it takes a shot. Well, if it takes 60 frames to make a full second of video, if you're doing 60 frames per second, or maybe 30, think about that. 30 frames with one every three seconds. Well, that means it's going to take 90 seconds of real time to create one second of finished video. That's an excellent way to really speed things up here. In fact, it might be a little too fast. So let's take that down to two seconds. Now what's going to happen is one minute of real time becomes one second of time lapse animation, which is pretty cool. I'm go ahead and dial in a total image count, and this is how many frames I want it to capture. Again, think about the math. If you want to produce a 30-second animation and you are recording in 30 frames per second, well, that's 900 frames. And you might want to bump that up just for safety. So I'll set this to 1,000, which should give me about 30 seconds of animation. I'll go ahead and press Set, and I can look at the settings. Looks good. Everything is there. Check my settings and my focus. I'll half-press the shutter button. Looks good. Make sure everything's dialed in. Dial in my overall exposure changes. There we go. Looks good. And in manual mode here, nothing is going to change. So I'll just flip this over so it starts to move. Let's angle that to minimize the reflection, and we'll press the shutter button. Now it begins to capture. You'll notice what's happening is it's going through and getting each shot. This is a really good time to be shooting on a tripod because you don't want to have to stand here, holding your body position for 30 minutes. It'll never work. A tripod or perhaps a slider or another type of camera support really works well here to give you stability. I'll often travel with GorillaPods or Platypods, so I can just put the camera right on the ground, and have it be rock solid. All right, this is going to take a little bit to shoot, so let's let this run through, and when it's all done, we'll check the results. Once it's done recording, you're going to need to turn this into a file. Now, you could do this with post-production software, but your camera may be able to do it as well. So let's go ahead and play that back. And you see that it indicates that this is a sequential shot. I can now press Up to start the playback. And you see it plays back. Now in this case, it's just playing all of the individual files, and this is because we haven't actually generated a movie yet. These are ready to be post-processed in another application. So you see it's playing those back relatively quickly, but it's not actually a movie. This is just the sequential playback of all 1,000 frames. Now we can actually generate a movie. In this case, you'll see it's actually turned into a video file. Now the sped-up playback is the time lapse, and you see that we significantly condensed the action. As you see, it creates a dreamlike state with new types of motion. Time-lapse photography is a lot of fun, and I'm got a bunch of in-depth courses I invite you to check out. It doesn't matter what type of camera you use. You can create some great content. So if this interests you, be sure to check out some of my other courses.
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