The Art In The Awareness Of Time
Human attention span has supposedly dropped from 12 seconds in 2002 to only eight seconds in 2013, which is a second shorter than a goldfish. So, it makes perfect sense that content creators are constantly working on ways to keep us engaged in their work. Some people will edit flashy photos, or queue their videos to catchy music, and maybe even set something on fire - because, why not? The fact is that, it’s true! We need, as creators and artists, to be able to look ahead and not only entertain our audiences for more than eight seconds, but for as long as we possibly can. This is where the trouble comes up for many! It’s often that we find ourselves stuck in a pattern of comfort and convenience and don’t get out and try something, fail, pick it up and do it better next time.
I recently have started a lot of these. I started a YouTube Channel, and someone left me a comment explaining that my talking points were too quiet - something I completely missed, when I was editing. So, I made sure that everything seemed more balanced while recording and also while editing my second video. I took something new (recording my voice and editing the tracks) and failed, but then got back and did it again - Just better.
Today, I’m happy to have you here, and happy to share with you a new tool to add to your creative collective - The Hyperlapse.
I guarantee that starting off you’ll get discouraged and frustrated because, as the effect is so cool to see, when done well, it’s a trick of temperance and knowing that you will be spending a lot of time photographing and editing to make something that will last for moments. And I live for this kind of work.
First, if you haven’t seen my video on YouTube, demonstrating this technique from beginning to end, please check it out HERE.
If you have seen it, Thanks! Now on to iron out the finer details that might be missed in the video.
These days a lot of people ask me what kind of gear they should be using to take their photos. I try to offer my favorite bits of kit, but never forget to explain that any camera will work. Most Smartphones today are more powerful than the DSLR I’ve been using over the past 5 years! So, when I shot the video, I wanted to show that you can make a killer hyperlapse with anything that takes still photos - lots of them. The idea behind a hyper lapse is pretty simple: create a moving Time-lapse. To do this, you will be taking as many photos as you can between two points and have a fixed point that you can always focus on, as a reference. Many people create Hyperlapses with Tripods or a Monopod (which I used whilst shooting the video at the beginning of the tutorial), but you can even create them hand-held, if there is enough light out! I wanted to showcase this by setting up my Sony A7S on a tripod, far away, and made a time-lapse of me making a hyperlapse (hyperlapse inception) with just my iPhone 6S, handheld and nothing fancy about it.
The specific tips I’d recommend for the photo-taking process are simple enough. If you are using a tripod/monopod, move the stand the width of your foot, for each photo. This is really handy (footy?) so that you have a consistent distance per shot, and this is important because before you take a single photo, you want to walk the path you’re planning on taking and do a couple things (I know, this get more and more complex).
Find the scene you want to shoot. In the example in the video, I wanted to focus on capturing the movement of the pier, along with the movement of the birds and the boats. The sky was pretty flat and overcast, but there was a little cloud movement, which is always a great thing to catch in a time-lapse/hyperlapse. I then walked the distance, Heel-to-toe, so I could gauge how many photos I would be able to take. This is important because you’re essentially making a little video, and videos have rules, like frames per second. (Breathe…) So, for example, if I walked Heel-to-toe and took 15 steps, and took a photograph every half step, or the width of my foot, I would have roughly 30 photos. And if I decided to make my video 30fps (frames per second), then I would have a one second hyperlapse, which is never very impressive, considering how much work you’re about to do to get it. So, shoot as many photos as you can, and the shorter the distance you need to travel, the smoother your video will be. Just remember that if you want to have a 5 second hyperlapse, you’ll need to shoot about 150 photos, and I usually aim to shoot every two seconds, or as quickly as I can. If you want a really epic and long Hyperlapse, be prepared to shoot and hold a camera for a long time. The statue at Columbus Circle, in the video, took me about 45 minutes to shoot during the day, and I repeated it at night, so I could have the option of when to cut. It should put into perspective how many photos were taken and edited to make my 1 minute Hyperlapse at the beginning of the video (I took over 5000 photos and ended up using around 2000, so that I’d have options).
You also want to make sure that as soon as you’re ready to start your hyperlapse, you won’t need to stop for anything. A time-lapse is convincing because it takes so many photos, evenly, so we can see how the clouds move smoothly across the sky. So, if you’re shooting a Hyperlapse and get a call from your Cousin Tom - don’t answer it. If you have to pee, suddenly - don’t stop shooting. This is all because you want the smoothest and most realistic capturing of time and those clouds you’re not noticing moving will be really obvious when you’re editing.
Once you’ve shot your photos, you’ll want to drop them onto your laptop and open up Adobe Lightroom. This program and Adobe After Effects are so important for this effect to look as smooth and professional as possible, so if you don’t have them already, I’d suggest downloading the Adobe Creative Cloud and pay the monthly fee to use the programs - it gives me access to everything for a relatively inexpensive look, but I’m pretty sure you will also have a 30 day free trial period.
Once in Lightroom, import your photos and then scroll towards the middle of the hyperlapse. Select one in the middle and begin to edit it to your heart’s content. As you can see in the video, I put a lot of time and work into creating the most dynamic photo, so get familiar with working with Lightroom and have fun. This part of the process is so enjoyable to me because it’s the meat of the hyperlapse - if this looks bad, the video won’t look any better.
After you edit the photo, select copy, or hit Command+ C (copy) and then highlight all of the photos. Once they’re all selected and showing with a white box around them, select the “Sync” button, make sure everything is selected in the boxes to the window that pops up, and hit Enter. Boom, now you have placed the edits you made on the one photo, on all the photos. Best feeling ever. Now, with everything still selected, hit Command+Shift+E (Export) and fill out where you’d like the files to end up. Give the project an easy but relevant name and make sure they’re jpegs that are resized to around 2500-3000 pixels. Much larger and you’re editing in After Effects will take forever, and any smaller, you risk losing information to work with. Hit Enter and Bam, you are one step closer to finishing up. Once you’ve exported your photos, open up After Effects and get ready.
I know in the video I sped things up quite a bit and may have rushed certain points, but that’s only because there are hundreds of videos on YouTube that talk about similar things, and I felt that I can write a little more on here to help.
In AE, hit Command+i to import your sequence of photos. I say sequence of photos because the way AE works is awesome. You won’t have to add every photo, but just click one in the sequence and hit enter. It will import all of the photos in one folder, rather than hundreds of separate folders. Then I like to change the default 8bpc to 16bpc for more information to work with, resulting in a higher quality video. I then take the sequenced folder of my photos and drag it beside the 16bpc icon, to create a new composition.
Here you’ll be able to set up all sorts of customized options, but for now you can just hit enter and get started on the hyperlapse, since we’ll go back later and change the Comp settings.
If you hit the space bar or RAM Preview button, you’ll be able to see what the Hyperlapse looks like at the beginning - usually just awful. It doesn’t matter how steady we are, if you’re using a tripod or not, these things just never look that great before the editing process. Now, hopefully, you can really cut down your editing time by a lot, with the effect “Warp Stabilizer” alone. This tool is fantastic and usually does a pretty good job with correcting your image by selecting position points that are familiar throughout, accounting for rotation and scaling the photo down a bit with a crop to get rid of weird edges.
But, if it doesn’t work, or doesn’t work as well as you’d like, I’ll now be showing how to do everything the manual way. It’s the same thing that Warp Stabilizer does, but you will have the control to make sure everything stays tracked.
So, if Warp Stabilizer doesn’t want to work very well, you can just delete it from your video file - for now. What you will want to do is go to the “Window” tab at the top of the screen and select Tracker. With that open, click on your video file, on the timeline, and select Stabilize Motion. You’ll notice that it already has the box with the word “Position” checked and a box will appear on your preview screen. Expand the outside box a bit and the inner box a little as well. In the middle should be a small +, which is the point you’re tracking. You want to place this somewhere in the center of the screen, usually on whatever you were using as your fixed tracking point, when shooting the photos to begin with. You also want there to be a significant amount of contrast where your point meets, so, in my video, I used the top of the tower, which was black. Against the sky, it’s a perfect spot to track.
Underneath the “Stabilize Motion” button, you’ll see a few buttons that look like “play forward/backward” buttons. The far right is track forward one frame, and the one before it is just track forward. I really feel it’s better to always track forward one frame at a time, so that you can follow the points and reposition them where they need to be. The computer will do a pretty good job keeping the points where they need to be, but there will always be points where they fall off. It took me fifteen minutes to track my example video at the pier because it kept losing the focus.
Once you’re done and have tracked every frame, hit Apply and select X + Y, which are your Left/Right and Up/Down coordinates. If you hit the space bar and let it render through, you’ll be able to see exactly what you did. Now your images should all be rearranged so that the tracked point you selected is perfectly framed and level. To test this, place your cursor on the point you tracked and make sure that the point you tracked doesn’t move off the point your cursor is resting on. So, now that you have a fixed position, you’re getting closer. But you’ll notice that it still has a wobble, like the photos are rotating around that point you made, like you stuck a tack in a stack of photos and moved them around. So, let’s fix that.
The project you just worked on is your composition, with the position edit you just made. Go to the top and slide to the side to get back to your comp window, select that comp you just made and drag that into the composition box again. This is creating a new comp with the effects you already applied on the last comp. Think of it like, saving your file and reloading it, to do more work on. Clean Slate.
We are going to be doing the same thing in this comp as the last comp, with a slight twist.
Go to Windows, select Tracker and click Stabilize Motion. But now, select Rotation and deselect Position.
You’ll see that there are now two boxes. Don’t worry. It’s the same idea. Expand the outer and inner boxes of each one, and drag them to two points, near the center and running on a vertical or horizontal plain. In the example at the pier, I chose the same pole and just found a point at the base. I put one at the top and one at the bottom and Boom, hit Track Forward and make adjustments as you go, if you need to. Hit Apply and select X+Y. When you RAM preview this footage it’ll be deceiving. It’ll look like it’s having a seizure and also smooth at the same time. This is because it’s almost done. What we have been doing is setting your computer up with the best version of the end product as possible, so with the final step, we’re going to run Warp Stabilizer again and it’ll take an already pretty awesome, smooth hyperlapse and make it so smooth.
Drag the second comp that we just worked on, with the Rotation tracking, into a new composition (So, this should be your third comp). Go to the effects tab, go to Distort and select at the bottom Warp Stabilization. Let it render and interpret the footage - this will take a minute or two. You can also boost the Smoothness up to around 100, from 50, and be sure that the Method box is choosing Subspace Warp. Hit RAM preview and see how smooth the hyperlapse has become!
All you have to do now is set it up for the formatted size you’d like to show it on. I like to share in HD, so go back to the top of the screen and select Composition, then select Composition Settings. Here you can make it perfect. Deselect the Aspect Ratio Lock and change your comp size to 1920x1080 and change your frame rate to 24fps, so that for every second of playtime, 24 frames will pass by, rather than 30. This way, you can have a slightly longer video and it’ll feel more natural to watch, since we’ve been watching films at 24fps since the invention of the Motion Picture - which you just created.
Hit select to apply the effects, then add the final Comp to the Render Queue, change the Lossless format from Animation to Apple Pro Res 422 (HQ). Then confirm that choice, hit render and you have FINALLY made your awesome Hyperlapse video.
They are addicting and there will always be room to get better, so keep working at them and tag me in any projects that you work on!
All Content Created/Edited by me.
Here are some links to the gear that I recommend you check out, if you’re interested in elevating your content.
Pro Gear - Click Here
Beginner Gear - Click Here
