Quick Time-Lapse From My Window from Micah Walter on Vimeo.

Following up on last week’s post, I decided to try my hand at some more time-lapse style photography. I am sort of doing research for an upcoming project that will involve audio, stills and video and will probably incorporate some time-lapse effects.

To get myself started I decided to look at a few different techniques. The first was to create a quick time-lapse that has a zooming component. To do this I just set up my camera on a tripod and started shooting out my apartment window. I took a sequence of 5 or 6 frames and then zoomed the lens a notch. I didn’t spend too much time on this and so as you can see from the video the zooming could have been a little smoother. I also ran into trouble when I switched to a longer lens that started to move the tripod position.

I imported all the images into Aperture and to make life simple, I just dragged them out to a folder as Jpeg previews. To make a really simple time-lapse you can just open the folder as an “image sequence” in QuickTime, pick a frame rate and it will turn your stills into video!

Standard Time-lapse from Micah Walter on Vimeo.

My next proof-of-concept setup was a little more elaborate. The result was a pretty boring time-lapse shot but the way I set it up was kind of cool. For this I tethered my Canon 20D to my laptop with its USB cable. I then created a short script in Automator. The Automator script works like this:

1 - Take Picture
2 - Import To Aperture
3 - Pause
4 - Loop

This very simple script gives me a quick and dirty intervalometer without much work at all. I let it run for a while and when I came back it had captured and imported over 350 images into a project in Aperture.

I did the same steps as above, dragging out the Jpeg previews from Aperture and opening them in QuickTime.

To make the films ready for upload to Vimeo.com I decided to Final Cut Pro so that I could make sure the resulting video was in HD format. In FCP I just added the Jpeg previews to a project making sure to set my still frame rate to about half a second. I then exported the sequence using Compressor ( direct from FCP ) and compressed it as an m4v file with H.264 encoding.

I’m planning to do a lot more with film, stills and audio all in the mix. I really like the way I can sort of mix and match workflows, using Aperture to handle all of my stills, and Final Cut Pro and Soundtrack Pro for the motion and audio components. I am also very interested to find out more about using Final Cut Server to manage these on a larger scale. It looks to be sort of the Aperture for video productions.