I’ve worked with hundreds of talented photographers, video editors, and designers over the years, helping them solve technical problems or accomplish whatever creative task might be at hand. One trend that I see over and over is that there’s never only one possible way to tackle a workflow problem. We all have so many tools in our digital toolkit: whether it’s Aperture, Photoshop, Final Cut Studio, the iLife apps, custom scripting, or even QuickTime Player and Preview, there are always an endless number of ways of solving a particular problem when it comes to digital media.

I was reminded of this recently when I helped a friend post-process a fantastic time lapse video using Aperture in an unlikely way. Our company, Control Group, was lucky enough to host our annual holiday party on the 45th floor of the new 7 World Trade Center building. The floor is over 40,000 square feet of raw commercial space that hasn’t been built-out yet - basically a giant open space of glass and concrete. Needless to say, the views are breathtaking, so my colleague Dan Gottesman decided to use our unique access to this space as an opportunity to create a time lapse video of the city 45 stories below.

Sample raw frame from time lapse. Click to enlarge.

Dan set up a rig using an old Nikon Coolpix, a MacBook Pro, and Dragon Stop Motion. The result was a killer series of shots showcasing our office building, the Woolworth Building, as day turned to dusk. (See the finished videos and read more about Dan’s setup on his Flickr page.) When the capture was complete, a full resolution QuickTime video was exported from Dragon, and it became obvious that the video needed a little post production clean up: there were sensor artifacts and bright, dead pixels left behind by the 7-year-old Coolpix 5000 sensor. (See close up of artifacts below.)

My first thought was to take the video into After Effects and use its toolset to retouch the spots out of the footage. However my After Effects skills are pretty elementary, so I started thinking of processing the footage frame by frame. After all, the sensor artifacts and bright spots were in the exact same location on every frame. The healing brush in Photoshop? Maybe create an automated action? And then it occurred to me that this is a natural use of Aperture’s Lift and Stamp tool.

Close-up detail of sensor artifacts. Click to englarge.

I imported all the frames into Aperture, and used a combination of the Retouch tool and Spot & Patch to remove the sensor spots and streaks on one image. Then I Lift/Stamped the adjustment onto all 700 other photos. I exported the photos at 1280 x 720 and opened the sequence in QuickTime. The entire process took only a few minutes.

It’s funny I didn’t think of using Aperture right away, but I haven’t used it much in the past few months so it wasn’t at the top of my list of possibilities. Plus I rarely use the Lift and Stamp tool in this manner - I tend to use it mostly for applying white balance corrections and keywording. If I were an After Effects pro, I’m sure I could have accomplished my goal in a few minutes using AE, or if I only had Photoshop on my machine I could have used it as well. But I liked the process of experimenting with a few other ideas and arriving at Aperture by deduction.

In the case of this project, I enjoyed the process as much as the product. Check out a low-res version of the video below, or hit Dan's Flickr page to see all the final videos and Dan’s excellent description of how he did it.

Day turns to dusk from the 45th floor of 7 World Trade Center.