Timelapse
Creating timelapse videos may be fun and produce surprising results. You only need a camera capable to store plenty of pictures, a tripod and probably some software to assemble the pictures into a video. Some cameras already provide functions to generate timed image sequences or even save such a sequence as a video file right out of the box.
Preparations
Before shooting you should have at least a coarse idea about the final result. The nowadays usual timelapse clips of clouds and weather at least require a decent amount of time. This short clip, for example, is composed from about 560 images, taken over a duration of 90 minutes:
Setup and Settings
For this kind of clips a tripod is more or less mandatory. Sadly I've missed to take care of the ground which wasn't stable enough so people walking around produce a slight shift which is pretty difficult to correct afterwards.
Difficult to correct as well are fluctuations in brightness or whitebalance, moving framing or focal point to missed deactivation of shake reduction or autofokus. As a rule of thumb: Just disable all automatic functions.
This may not work in any situation, for example if the project should include changing illumination from a sunset. Then an additional camera function may be handy, like exposure interpolation between pictures.
As you probably already noticed, I'm out at night as well and stay impressed by just looking into the stars. So why not just take a timelapse:
If you look more closely into the sky, you will find some targets which are worth to be captured with a timelapse video. The next clip shows the path of comet C/2017 K2 over two hours on July 15th, 2022, when he passes the Messier object M10, from our perspective. The video pulsates slightly, since it uses the raw monochrome images taken while imaging the comet.
The Camera
Using a DSLR for longtime timelapse video does not seem to be the right tool, since it easily takes a thousand images per clip. Both my D70 and the D200 handled that quite well, though.
Mirror-less cameras seem to better fit for this purpose. And there are action cams which already provide timelapse functionality and are much cheaper as well, so I have less problems to let it run unobserved a whole day. This day-clip was taken using a Hero4 action cam:
Frame Interpolation
Sometimes there there are simply not enough frames available, to obtain a smooth sequence. So if the video should be played at 30 frames per second, a total of 120 images are just four seconds. That's not much. As long as a continuous movement is captured, there are smart algorithms available to render in-between frames. For the following example I used public available images from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of America (NOAA).
These images are provided in intervals of 5 resp. 10 minutes, so you'll get about 144 images per day which play in about 4.8 seconds at 30FPS. To obtain a playtime more than a minute, Topaz Video AI was used to generate interpolated images.
Btw.: The data used was from April 8th in 2024, so the sequence captured to total solar eclipse of Northamerica as well. That clip not only shows the path of totality, you may also track the sun's specular reflection on the earth:
Software Tools
Nowadays creation of timelapse videos got rather simple. There are several tools around, which even may compensate for changing light conditions between frames. For my purposes I use DaVinci Resolve from Blackmagic, since this is part of my toolbox anyway. While kind of overpowered for creating timelapse videos, as a full featured video editor suite even the free version offers all necessary functions from combining the images, making crops or even zooms on the timeline and finally save the result in various formats.
For frame interpolation I am using the not-so-cheap Topaz Video AI, since this is part of my toolbox anyway too.
My legacy Workflow
In the early days I had to use several tools to obtain my results. While no longer useful, I'll keep this block online for historical reasons.
Depending on your camera's capabilities some tools may be useful or even required. Without claiming for completeness and focusing on Windows here are some I use.
- Assemble individual images into a video clip
In case your camera can not save a timelapse sequence as a video file but as individual images instead, you'll need a tool to combine them into a video clip. I am using the legacy VirtualDub for this purpose, even if you may need some time to get comfortable with it.
The individual images probably do not have a proper aspect ratio for video as well, so they need to be cropped either before loading into VirtualDub or you may configure filters in VirtualDub to convert while saving the video file.
In order to save VirtualDub requires a video codec as well, I am using Xvid for this purpose. Output will be an AVI file, so likely not the final format. - Edit the video clip
To add fades or an audio track to your clip, a simple video editor is recommended. You probably can use any for this step, I use VideoDeluxe from Magix for this purpose. - Create final video file
Your video editor probably is able to output various video formats, so you may not require an additional tool. But sometimes it could be quite handy to have a separate tool for transcoding video or creating various sizes from an existing high definition version. You may have a look at Handbrake, which is an open source video transcoder with plenty of parameters to probably fulfil any output requirement.