nanatahainorman: ViDEO: Time-Lapse

Time-lapse adalah merupakan process merekodkan sesuatu babak atau object pada sesuatu keadaan dan suasana mengikut peredaran waktu. Ia juga merupakan sesuatu yang sangat menarik hasilnya bila kita play semua video tersebut.

Cara paling mudah untuk merecodkan suasana ni adalah dengan menggunakan kamera yang diletakkan pada sesuatu tempat pada jangkamasa yang lama bagi merecordkan segala perubahan keadaan atau pergerakkan yang berlaku secara perlahan-lahan (seperti awan, tumbuh-tumbuhan yang semakin membesar, cuaca, manusia dan lain-lain objek)

Kamera yang diletakkan pada posisi yang sama sepanjang masa akan snap beberapa photo untuk beberapa jam atau hari. Sound boring sangat kan??

Beberapa photo yang telah di recordkan selama beberapa jam atau hari tersebut akan digabungkan ke dalam satu video dengan hanya beberapa minit sahaja. Bila kita lihat hasilnya nampak sangat menarik!

Play videonya mungkin hanya selama 30 saat saja dan nampak mudah tapi prosesnya, ya ampun lama nak mampos..! So here how the process start:

1) Understanding The Fundamentals
Kita bermula dengan memahami beberapa peraturan asas.Kebiasaannya setiap satu saat dalam video terdiri daripada 24-30 bingkai gambar, ianya dikira dengan frame per saat (unit fps). Jika anda menonton video 2 minit pada 24 fps, ia bermakna terdapat sekitar 2880 keping gambar dengan kelajuan video yang sangat cepat.

Untuk menghasilkan video time lapse ini, pada dasarnya kita harus mengurangkan gabungkan photo yang dimasukkan ke dalam 24-30 fps video. Contohnya, jika kita mengambil gambar matahari terbenam pada jangkamasa masa 12 jam dan snap gambar pada setiap 1 minit, kita akan mempunyai 720 gambar. Dengan hanya menggabungkan 24 fps, anda akan mempunyai video matahari terbenam dalam 30 saat. Bestkan!

2) Choosing your camera

If you are iphone user like me here are two iPhone applications that allows you to do Time-lapse photography.

iTimeLapse This is a all-in-one application that allows you take Time-lapse photo, and choose the background music, edit individual frames and renders the final video. It even allows you to upload to youtube on the fly.

Gorillacam. This app is free, and it allows you to do Time-lapse photography as wel. However, it does not do the video rendering part.

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The best camera is dSLR (Digital Single-lens Reflex) camera is a better choice for Time-lapse photography compared to point-and-shoot camera or others. It has higher output quality and better control. If you are a dSLR user, you probably know better. Let’s take a look at some of the equipments needed together use with dSLR:

Tripod: It is important to make sure your camera is stationary and consistency taking photos of the exact same location without moving here and there. Of course, you have do it without a tripod, but the choices of subject will be limited and challenging to have your camera maintain stability.

Intervalometers: Work similar like remote control. what it does is it allows you to set your dslr to hit the shutter button at the interval your prefer, e,g., every 1 second, every 10 second or every 1 minute.

There are softwares out there that allows your laptop to take control of your dSLR’s shutter interval. They work like Intervalometers, allowing you to set the interval between each frame. But that means, your laptop will have to be connected to your dSLR via USB cable the entire time during the Time-lapse project.

Nikon users: D5100 (Menu > Internal time Shooting > 10-15 sec/frame) others options is

Sofortbildapp (Mac) / D-Software Cam Control (Win) / Nikon Capture 4.0 (Win & Mac)

Canon / Olympus users: DSLR Remote Pro (Win & Mac) / inPhoto Capture (Win).

3) Post Editing Time-Lapse Photos

Selepas prosess shooting dah selesai camera kita mengandungi akan penuh dengan beratus-ratus atau beribu-ribu gambar, bergantung kepada tempoh projek. Kadang-kadang ada boleh beberapa perkara-perkara kecil yang perbetulkan sebelum penggabungan gambar tersebut ke dalam video, contohnya seperti brightness, cropping, white balance, etc.

Mengedit gambar adalah satu kerja yang sangat membosankan. So i found this option bagaimana kita boleh menedit pada kadar yang lebih cepat.

A. Photoshop “Action” And “Automate” Function
Drag one of the photo into Photoshop and practice the tweaks you want on it. Once you are comfortable with the outcome, create a Photoshop “Action” (Windows -> Actions) and redo the entire process again so the action is recorded.

Next, batch automate all files (File -> Automate -> Batch) and telling Photoshop:

Which action to use
Source of your images (folder)
Source of your output (folder)

Hit the OK button and Photoshop will start editing all photos according to the pre-set action. You can now sit back and wait until the entire process is over. hahhaaaaa... senang kan??

or else

B. Lightroom
Adobe Lightroom is another good alternative to batch post-edit your photos. If you swear by Lightroom to manage your photos, you should already be familiar with this function. But if you are not, no worries – it’s easy.

After importing your photo into Lightroom, you can start by editing of of the photo in the Develop Mode. Once it’s done, select the photos (most probably all of them) you want to have the same effect and hit the Sync button. This will take all the effects you applied on the first photo and apply them on all the photos you’ve selected.

*Hold the Control (Win) / Command (Mac) key with Sync button will turn it into Auto Sync.

4. Combining Photos Into Movie
This is the last step, also the most exciting step as you’ll be merging all your photos into a beautiful Time-lapse video. There are few applications that will assist you to do that. We’ll talk about few of the common ones.

Apple Quicktime Pro 7 (Win / Mac)
Go to File -> Open Image Sequence, locate the folder of your Time-lapse photos, select the first photo and hit open button. You can then sit back and let Quicktime do the rest of the job.