The web is awash with Timelapse. It started with Ross Ching and his Eclectic series, and now Tom at Timescapes.org has started to do some really amazing stuff particularly in low light. This has kicked off Philip Bloom as well.
Now, if you want to have a go at timelapse and you're using a Mac to put the sequences together then you really should make use of Automator as well. I mean, you don't really fancy resizing thousands of images by hand do you?! (Or even working with bigger files than you need to....!)
When shooting timelapse, you have no need to shoot at full res. In fact, you're better off shooting at Medium or Small JPEG to save card space and because you don't need all that file size to create a full HD film. However, even with the Small or Medium JPEG settings on cameras like the EOS 5D Mark II and EOS 7D your files will still be bigger than needed and also the wrong format. Automator can solve this problem for you quickly and easily.
The settings for Automator that I use are as follows:
1. Get Specified Finder Items
2. Copy Finder Items (to ensure you don't resize the originals)
3. Get Folder Items
4. Crop images: To Dimensions (1920x1080) Scale before crop: Scale to Width.
This will take your files and crop them to the 1920x1080 resolution ready to be put into an image sequence. It's also quicker to do this to the files beforehand rather than trying to deal with over large files afterwards.
If you're a Mac user and you can't be bothered to create the automator action yourself, I've created it for you and you can download it from here. Just unzip it and import it to Automator. I'd then save it as an application on your desktop so you can just drop files onto it to re-size.
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Dave Newton
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Automator Garth, Automator is a program that is included with Mac OS X. It should be on your system already. Do a spotlight search (Apple + Space) and type automator. It should appear in spotlight and you can open it from there by hitting return. To use it, shoot your images, get them ready for use in terms of colours etc (if you shot RAW) or just point them to a folder if JPEGs. Then use the automator action to resize them to suit. Dave |
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Garth Henderson
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Automator... Is Automator similar to Aperture/Final Cut Pro from Apple? Should I first download/log/ render files using Canon's bundled software before using something like Automator? If Automator is a third party app. where can I download it from and how expensive is it? Cheers guys, GB |
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Dave Newton
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... Hi Garth, the link should now be fixed and working properly. Sorry about that! Dave |
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Curtis Copeland
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Great tutorial on post processing tome lapse! Thanks for the insight. This is great stuff. http://www.curtiscopeland.com |
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Robert Vinet
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Great Time Saver Thanks for a great time saver. I'll try it out on my next timelapse project. |
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