"manual" is out of the option because a) it is not elegant and b) I have way too many frames in that sequence – 580,924 frames in 3 sequences, to be precise.Īnother: my client (who has not been seeking advice from anyone beforehand) has set up his own cameras a year ago (on a construction site) and has been shooting that timelapse until now, when they approached me.
The point of the story, time-lapse requires careful planning. A couple of months of rotoscoping and a composite and we had an amazing shot that national public television ran one time. Then we went to LA, built a set with the same topography as the foreground, got Bart the Bear to walk through the scene. This project ran from mid March to the last week in November and by the time we were done we had a 90 second shot of the sun rising and setting while the seasons changed. Because every trip had a different length day I had to adjust the speed of the pan and the timing between frames so every sequence was the same number of frames. Once I traveled to the same location every 10 days and used a motion control rig to get a time lapse sequence of the sun rising, snow melting, wild flowers blooming, trees filling out, leaves changing color, falling and then snow falling and covering the ground as the camera panned from sunrise to sunset in Glacier National Park. I've done a bunch of time-lapse with long exposure times and I've changed the frame rate a lot of times through out the day sometimes starting with multiple second exposures at the start of the day and transitioning to short exposures many seconds apart throughout the day, ending up with long exposures at night. I've been doing time-lapse for more than 40 years and I have never shot bursts of frames. I am not sure that even Twixtor - RE:Vision Effects would be up to the task. Depending on the action in the shot this could look very odd. You're going to end up with 4 frames from one burst and 5 from another at some point in time. There is no way for AE to blend 9 frames at a time. Unless you purchase some 3rd party solutions you can't take a bunch of footage of something like cars driving down a freeway at night and blend the frames together to get the kind of light streaks you would get if you held the shutter open for several seconds when you shot the time lapse.ĭepending on how you originally set up the camera and how the camera is moving you might be better off automating a blend of the 9 frames using Lightroom or photoshop and then creating a new sequence. Overlay basically adds everything above 50% gray. Add adds up all the pixel values and makes the image brighter. When you blend multiple frames the choices are to use blending modes. You just have to do the math.ĪE's built in frame blending has few options. Time-remapping is as accurate as any other method and IMHO opinion does a better job of blending frames. Or is there any other way to fix this (i.e., to only blend those 9 frames together, without "spilling over")? (At least from frame #2 onwards.)ĭoes that have something to do with the comp's shutter speed or phase? (Experimenting with that did not seem to have any effect so far.)
(Aside: I sped up the layer to a target duration of 11.111%, and – since that is not totally precise – also experimented with interpreting it with a 9-times framerate (60 x 9 = 540).)īoth ways, when I go from frame to frame in the timeline, it shows every 9th frame, as expected.īut when I turn on "frame blending", the blending does not only happen on those desired 9 frames, but rather introduces traces of previous frames, too. So I thought I could speed up the clip times 9.
Instead of discarding 8 of the frames, I thought I could blend them all together, to reduce noise and take advantage of some minor motion blur.
In the end, I want to have only 1 frame for every 15 minutes. The camera has made bursts of 9 frames every 15 minutes. I have an image sequence of a timelapse I try to speed up.