Timelapse movie of Hanelei Valley in Kauai

As mentioned in a previous post, I’m still working through my 1400 images from a recent trip to Oahu and Kauai in the Hawaiian Islands. One of my experiments this time was a timelapse movie that I will upload to a few stock video sites. The steps are not that complex if you haven’t done this before:

• Set your camera up on a tripod and carefully frame and level the shot
• Set the quality to Jpeg and, if you can, set a smaller frame size to keep the images to a reasonable size. There is no need to have an image much bigger than HD video size (1920 x 1080) unless you plan to crop the image before creating your movie
• If your camera lets you set shots to be taken at a specific time interval, do that – for my Canon, I had to use the Promote Remote control that has a flexible intervalometer.
• Calculate the interval between shots. If you are planning an HD movie at 24 frames per second, then first decide on the length of your finished movie (mine was 10 seconds). For that length, I needed 240 shots. Then decide how long you want to film – 90 minutes for my sunrise, which is 5400 seconds, divide this by the number of shots (240) to get your interval (22 seconds). In the end, I set it for 15 seconds, which gave me a little less time at the location.
• Set your exposure. In the case of the sunrise, it is quite dark at the start and it is going to get brighter, so I set up Aperture Priority. This will modify the shutterspeed as the light changes. The first shots were several seconds each, but it doesn’t matter as they will only be individual frames in the movie. Set your white balance to a fixed setting (daylight in my case) to avoid the camera making everything neutral.
• Sit back and watch the show!
• Back at your computer, I took the final shot and cropped it a bit using a ratio of 1.92:1.08 to get a better frame. I also lightened the shadows a bit. Then I copied the settings across all the other images in Lightroom. Then I exported all the images to JPEGs in a new folder with the maximum length set to 1920 pixels. I renamed them all with the title and a file number which puts them all in order.  This creates a new folder full of images that are all cropped and corrected and have dimensions of 1920 x 1080.
• Buy Quicktime Pro. This costs $30, but is a really easy system to use.
• Open Quicktime, choose File: Open Image Sequence and search for your first frame of the sequence. Set Frame rate to 24. When you click Open, the program creates a movie based on all your images. Just Play to see the new movie.
• Finally, to create the movie file, choose File: Export and select “Movie to Quicktime Movie” and select (in settings) the codec you normally use for stock video. I normally use Photo-JPEG, but that is probably a whole other discusssion. Click OK. This creates a HD .mov movie file that is suitable for uploading to the stock video sites.

I created a smaller version for web streaming (which Quicktime Pro allows you to do as well) so you can see the finished product:

[quicktime width=”500″ height=”300″]https://www.backyardsilver.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Kauai_sunrise-1-iPhone.mov[/quicktime]