Need Help with Timelapse

[david_d]

Hi all,

I’m compiling a few hundred thousand still images into a timelapse video and am wondering when to color correct. Should I compile my stills into raw(ish) clips and leave the color correction for later, in Premiere? Here’s my workflow, so far:

My stills are 5184 x 3456 H.264 (Canon 7D native JPEG compression). I’m using Adobe Photoshop to gather and export the images to 1920 x 1080i H.264 (Adobe Media Encoder) clips – one for each day of the project (for a total of maybe 150 clips). I’ll assemble the daily timelapse clips in Adobe Premiere, apply color correction, narration, etc., and export my final movie.

Does this seem reasonable? It’s gonna take me several weeks to render the clips so I want to get it right the first time – with or without color correction. I’m also worried that three rounds of H.264 compression will leave my final movie looking a bit course. Maybe my intermediate clips shouldn’t be reduced to 1920 x 1080? Shouldn’t be compressed at all? [Ugh.]

Any advice is greatly appreciated.

[Kevin Mc]

I think you’re on the right path. I would not compress anything till your final render, and would avoid pre-rendering any segments in advance of the final render. Same goes for color correction. If you’re able to do it in your in your final time line, it would allow you to make changes to the color – across the board – if you’re not happy with it. Just my 2 cents…

[digisidd]

I agree with Kevin you want to do all your post processing at the end. If you have Adobe Light room you can do all the color edits in light room. Light room should have a more nuanced ability to change things then premiere would. I have found that using the GoPro Studio application is a pretty easy way to make time lapses. You might use that just to do a quick test to see if you are liking what you are doing.

Sidd

[Kevin Mc]

Just for fun – here’s a GoPro time lapse that I recently shot, and ran the initial conversion in GoPro Studio. Shots were taken at 10 seconds apart over two and a half hours (only takes 30 seconds to watch):

[digisidd]

Nice video Kevin

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