KesslerCrane TheRedOwl RAW Timelapse
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Hey everyone. Welcome to the raw time lapse workflow tutorial extended. What we're going to be doing here today is taking a time lapse shot from beginning to completion. We're going to give you all the steps that you will need to fully utilize the power of camera raw in your time lapse photography. Some of you may be wondering why you should choose raw over JPEG. The overall reason that I give you is this the power shooting and raw can give you during post production raw can save you from errors that may occur during shooting using an improper white balance, having an over or under exposed shot or similar errors. Now, it can't fix everything but choosing to shoot your time lapses in camera raw is going to allow you much greater flexibility when you're adjusting picture exposure and trying to recover detail that Jpeg simply can't offer you for those of us who can afford expensive glass just yet. The options raw offers you to enhance your shot can become compelling quite quickly, simply put shooting in JPEG results in everything being baked in while shooting in raw allows you many nondestructive adjustments in post production that can give you more bang for a very little buck before we get started or go anywhere. There's going to be a few pieces of equipment that we'll need other than your camera. The next piece of gear you're going to need is going to be your inter velo meter today. I'll be using one from cannon, but we will have links to others in the video description. A tripod is essential for a steady time lapse, use what you have, but you won't regret investing in a quality tripod sing very D filter here is going to help us control our exposure to get the optimum camera settings that we want. Be careful when choosing an ND filter as some of the cheaper ones can result in a nasty color shift. Next, you'll need a lens cloth or other method for cleaning your lenses. Definitely clean your lenses before going out to shoot, but always check the lens and clean it before you start shooting. Also, be sure you have Gaff tape on set. It's absolutely essential to have enough batteries and memory cards for your shot. Make sure before you ever get out to the field that the memory cards you plan on using are ok to be formatted and your batteries are fully charged since you are shooting in camera raw, be prepared to use up a lot more space on your cards and hard drives. Now, some of you may be wondering why we didn't talk about lenses during our gear prep. The reason for that is actually quite simple, even though I already chose the appropriate lens for this time lapse, I bring all my lenses just in case the focal length that I chose doesn't work out for whatever reason, having all my lenses gives me a variety of focal lengths to choose from, thereby not limiting my options. Before we set our camera, I wanted to show you the power of this sing ray ND fader. Now, as you can see the shot is completely blown out and way over exposed. And the sing ray ND filter that I have right now is at minimum. But when I dial it up, you can clearly see how much it darkens the picture as we set our camera. The goal is to avoid flicker when setting your iris or F stop, avoid F-16 to F-22. Not only can it bring flicker into your time lapse, but it can bring out any crap that may be on your camera sensor when setting your shutter speed, avoid anything above 1 1/100 of a second when setting your isso. Just know that higher numbers are going to mean your camera is more sensitive to light when you go above ISOS like 800 usually there is a varying amount of noise introduced into the picture. So keep that in mind inside your camera is a mirror that can cause possible flicker in your time lapse. This mirror is how you view your shot through the optical viewfinder. There are two different ways to eliminate flicker here. The first is to simply enable live preview as I've done. So here this flips the mirror up preventing possible light leak through your viewfinder. The other method is to put Gaff tape over your viewfinder if you own a lower end DSLR such as A T two I I recommend using the Gaff tape method. So we set our camera here to an F stop of 818 th of a second shutter speed and 100 is to get a proper exposure using these settings. Our sing ray and the fader here is crucial before you proceed. Make sure your white balance is set to anything but auto check your focus and make sure it is on manual, not auto that is guaranteed to ruin your shot. The last thing we need to do is set our inner velo. I'm going to set my intervals here to three seconds. This chooses how many seconds are between each shot next long on our inter velo meter chooses how long we need per shot. This is our exposure time and I'm going to set my exposure here to one second. You're never going to need to do anything different unless you're doing long exposure work such as an astro time lapse, lastly set, how many frames you want the camera to shoot? I'm going to leave it set on 00, which is infinity on this Cannon inter velo. Now that we're all set to shoot, I'm going to start my time lapse and I'll see you in the edit suite. The first thing we're going to do is copy over our pictures. I already have a time lapse folder ready to go, but just as a rule of thumb, organize your assets by their type and it will be a lot easier for you to find things whenever you do need them during your project, gonna go ahead and create a 01 folder. Click on the first picture shift, click the last one, drag it over, make sure it's going into the right folder and then let go. As you can see, I have a lot of underscores in my folder naming structures. And the reason for that is simply because after effects does not deal well with spaces in folder names. So if I had a space here instead of an underscore after effects would have a hard time coping with that, you may get just several different types of error messages. So just save yourself some trouble and either add underscores in your folder names or just have no spaces at all. It's really up to you while our pictures are copying over. I also wanted to talk about the programs that we're gonna be using today. You're gonna need a bridge Adobe after effects and LR time lapse if you're not familiar with LR time lapse. You can find it at LR time lapse dot com. It's actually not a plug in for light room though. It does work really well with lightroom. It also works well with bridge and is actually a standalone program and not a software plug in. It's been provided by a German developer named Gunther Wegner. It is free though if you do like it, I highly suggest that you donate to Gunther so you can keep the development of this program going. It's a great program for de flickering your time lapses, but you can also key frame changes over time such as White Balance and a lot of different properties that we're gonna talk about later. Another option for delic in your time lapses I wanted to tell you about is GB Defer from Granite Bay software. You can find it at Granite Bay software dot com. It's a great option for a moving flicker personally, I've never used it, but I know a lot of people that swear by it and if you're looking for something that has a little tighter integration with after effects and Premiere Pro definitely check it out. It's available for CS four all the way to CS 5.5 and they do have a free trial. So you can see whether you like it or not. And one other website that I wanted to call attention to is timescape dot org. It's a website run by Tom Lowe who's currently working on his feature film, Timescape. The Time Lapse Forum on Timescape is pretty much the best one I've ever been to. Uh the community is very welcoming, very knowledgeable. And the I'm new to Time Lapse Forum is pretty much the best place you can go if you are in fact new to time lapse. When I first started learning about time lapse. This is where I went to and this is where I learned about a lot of the beginning concepts that we're gonna be talking about. So definitely check it out and join up with the community. I'm sure they'd love to have you. Now that our pictures have been copied over, I'm going to eject the card. The next thing we're gonna do is come over here to find her, go all the way to the bottom shift. Click the last picture, go ahead and hit space bar and normally I would use preview on my Mac here to check every single frame on my time lapse. What I check for when I go through all these pictures is mistakes that may have happened. The camera got bumped. A bird flew too close to the frame, anything like that. I've already checked all my frames though. So I'm gonna go ahead and close preview and our next step is to open Adobe Bridge. I'm gonna navigate to my projects folder here, Kesler time lapse, time lapses 01. As you can see, bridge has loaded up thumbnails for all the different pictures that we took for our time lapse. The first thing to do here with these thumbnails is to click on the first picture in our sequence. Go ahead and right. Click open in camera raw. The first thing we should notice is the white balance. I'm gonna come down here to auto just to show you sometimes camera raw gets it right. But in this case, it's chosen 6000 Kelvin, which is a little bit warmer than what I need. So I'm gonna try daylight, which is still a little bit warmer than what I want it to be. So I'm gonna go back to as shot and go ahead and crank it up to about 5300 Calvin. The next thing we should take note of is exposure. Now, our Srey ND fader allowed us to get a pretty even exposure. So I'm gonna move on down to recovery the first place you should look to find any type of recovery where it's actually bringing back some of that detail is high contrast areas with a lot of light and shadow such as these rocks down here. Recovery works great on clouds, especially ones that may be a little more blown out than you would like. So definitely use recovery as much as you can, but don't crank it up all the way. I'm gonna go ahead and leave it at about 71 and I'm gonna come down here to fill light purely to warn you not to use it. Fill light can be pretty gross looking, especially when you crank it up to numbers like 50 or anything like that. What it's trying to do is fill in areas where light did not exist before A K A shadows. So if you look down here at these rocks, there's a lot less contrast in there. And if we zoom in on these trees, we can see that fill light has completely just ruined them and it doesn't look good introduces a lot of noise. It's just a bad deal all around. So the only thing I can tell you about Phil light is either don't use it or use it sparingly because it can be really dicey really fast. I'm gonna leave blacks, brightness and contrast alone and I'm gonna come right down here to clarity. Clarity is actually the same as contrast. It just introduces contrast into only the mid toes of the image. So when I crank it up here to about 50 you can see immediately there's a lot more contrast and perceived detail on these rocks. Now, it's not actually bringing out any detail in them other than adding contrast in only the mids portion of the image. And that usually brings itself out in areas like these trees up here or the rocks down here. If I go the other way with clarity, you can see it gives it almost kind of a diffused kind of effect glowy, not really what we want. So I'm gonna take it back up to 50 and I'm gonna come down here to vibrance. Now, vibrance and saturation are the same as their interfaces might give away. But the main difference here with vibrance as with clarity is vibrance is saturation but only in the mid toes of the image. If I bring up the saturation like say the 87 we can see that it looks crazy saturated on every part of the image from the highlights all the way to the shadows. So I'm gonna bring that back down here to zero. And you can see when I crank up the vibrance, it's a little less gaudy than increasing the saturation to absurd levels. So usually I like to use vibrant to give the sky a little more blue or what have you. So definitely play with these settings. You may not want to introduce that much saturation right off the bat. It's really up to you. The other tab I wanted to call attention to here is the detail tab detail is where noise reduction is located and is really handy. If you're doing something like a long exposure, time lapse and astro time lapse, anything where you know your images are going to have a lot of noise. Definitely head right over here to the detail tab. Now that we're done, I'm gonna go down here and click done. As you can see both the thumbnail and the preview window have updated with the changes that we just made in the camera raw dialog box. I'd like to also point out that all these changes that we've made are completely nondestructive. Anything that we want to change in the future is definitely available to change. If you want to throw out everything and start from scratch, all you need to do is come over here to find her, go to the top and you can see that there's a new file here called an X MP file. X MP files are where Adobe Bridge is storing all the metadata of the changes that we've just made. So if you want to start fresh, just delete the X MP file and you're good to go. The next step in this process is to right. Click that first picture come down here to develop settings, copy settings, click the second picture in your sequence, shift, click the last picture, go ahead and right. Click any of the selected pictures come back down to develop settings, paste settings. The first thing you're gonna see is the paste camera, raw settings, dialog box. And the first thing you're gonna notice is how many different options we have for customizing what we want to copy to the other pictures. We don't need to change anything. So I'm just gonna go ahead and click. OK? Before we deselect any of these pictures, I want to call it your attention to bit depth 16, that's gonna be important later. And I'll explain when we get to Adobe after effects, go ahead and deselect the pictures. All you need to do is click anywhere in the gray area. The next thing I want to call your attention to is the thumbnail extractions down here on the left. Now, what it's doing here is updating all these thumbnails for our time lapse sequence. If you decide to quit Adobe Bridge, before these are done, sometimes there can be errors with LR time lapse and missing metadata. So I definitely recommend that you do not quit Adobe Bridge until these thumbnails are done updating. Now that all of our thumbnails have updated, go ahead and quit Adobe Bridge. The next program we're gonna be opening is LR time lapse. The first thing I want you to do is come over here to volumes. Volumes are hard drives. You're gonna navigate down to my projects folder. Once you do navigate to your folder that your time lapse pictures are located. The first thing that LR time lapse is going to do is read all the metadata that we just copied over in Adobe Bridge. Now that LR time lapse has loaded all the metadata from our pictures. I want you to go all the way down to the bottom. Make sure the first picture is selected and then go ahead and shift. Click on the last picture. The next thing you're gonna wanna do is check the D flicker box. We are taking these steps just as a precautionary measure. We did take all those different steps to reduce flicker while we were in the field shooting. If you have really bad flicker, if you forgot to do any of those steps, I definitely recommend moving up the strength and the smoothing properties. You may not get it right the first time. But there's only been one instance that I've run into where LR time lapse could not cure my flicker woes. So definitely experiment with those properties. Don't be afraid to take it all the way up to 20 if you have bad flicker. LR time lapse can definitely help you out if you come over here to transitions. I'm just gonna choose auto simply because all we're doing is de flickering. If you come up here and you see all these different categories, you'll notice that these are the options that we had when we were in the camera raw dialog box. And you can key frame these different changes between the first picture and the last picture. If you do key frame anything, you probably will not want to choose auto simply because it might not look the best or you want a more stylized transition. Uh Definitely play around with eased and linear. There's also a lot of different options here as far as choosing your transition. So definitely check those out. Since we're done. Our last step here is gonna be to save it. Go ahead and hit, ok. Go ahead and quit. LR time lapse. The next program we're gonna be opening here is Adobe after effects, the first thing I want you to do is come up here to after effects, go to your preferences, import next, come down here to sequence footage. What that means is every image sequence that you bring into after effects is gonna have this frame rate regardless of whatever you frame rate you set for your composition. So if you needed to have a different frame rate, say like 30 frames per second. This is where you would do it first before you import anything. I don't need to change this. So I'm just gonna hit, OK. Come over here to the project window, right? Click import file. I'm gonna come over here to the first picture in my time lapse sequence. Go ahead and click it. Next thing it's gonna say is format, camera import as footage, camera sequence. Go ahead and hit open. The next thing it's gonna bring up is the camera dialog box that we already messed with back in Adobe Bridge. So we're gonna go ahead and hit. Ok. Next come down to create a new composition. Go ahead and click it. I'm gonna name mine time lapse tutorial. I'm gonna leave the width and the height alone. It's 1920 by 10 80 with an aspect ratio of square pixels. It's got the same frame rate. Gonna go ahead and hit, ok. Next to import your image sequence into your composition, just click drag and let go. As you can see here, our time lapse is actually between 2021 seconds. So I'm gonna go ahead and trim the work area down, so we don't have any blank frames next. Go ahead and save your project and I'm just gonna call it time lapse tutorial. As you can see in our main composition window here, our full frame is not yet available to us. And that's because our scale, if you come down here and hit s it's gonna bring up the scale. Our scale is at 100%. And the reason for that is simply because the images that we shot are actually more than 5000 pixels wide and our composition is 10 80 P, but it's still effectively a two megapixel picture. What that allows us to do is have a lot of freedom with reframing our shot or animating a move over time. I'm gonna come down here to the scale, click on it and change it to 37.1%. Now, we have the full width of our pictures available to us. And if I zoom out just a little bit more, you can see that we have a lot of head room with reframing our shot on the Y axis, come back down here, hit P for position and I'm actually gonna crop the sky out just a little bit more due to the fact that there is no clouds in the sky. Literally nothing. That's gonna give us a sense of a passage of time like the shadows on the trees or the shadows on the rocks here would give us next. I'm gonna come over to the effects and presets window here and I'm gonna bring the curves effect over to our layer. And I'm just going to create a simple little S curve. This is gonna make for a much punchier image has a lot of contrast and perceived saturation. If I turn it off, the image seems a bit flatter than when I enable it. Next, I'm gonna come back to the effects and presets window type in un sharp and I'm gonna drag the un Shap mask over to our layer here. One thing to remember with the un Shap mask effect is less is more a lot more. If I come up here to the radius and crank it up to something ridiculous like uh 50 you can readily see that the type of sharpening this is introducing to the image is not aesthetically pleasing, it looks very, very strange. So just be mindful when you're changing the amount and the radius less is more, I'm actually gonna dial it back down to 30 and I'm gonna change the radius here to seven. You get a much greater sense of the effect. If I zoom in to 100%. And I'm going to turn the un Shap mask off. I'm gonna turn it back on and immediately in high contrast areas like these rocks, you can see the sharpening that it's bringing into the image. We have a lot greater flexibility with this because we shot our photos in camera raw. Go ahead and save it, command SS or control S on A PC. Go ahead and close the effect controls window and come down here to bits per channel or B PC. Go ahead and click on it and change it to 16 bits per channel and hit OK. You're not gonna notice this right off the bat, but a 16 bit per channel image is much greater quality than an eight bit per channel image. You're getting a ton more color information and we're taking full advantage of the photos that we've shot in camera raw because they are in fact 16 bits per channel, come up here to composition, hit, add the render queue. The first place you want to go is your output module. As you can see, it's on loss list right now, which is actually an animation code. If you wanted to create your own preset, say for pro res 422 HQ, you'd come to video output format options, compression type PRO S 422 HQ. And now you can see it says based on loss list, it's not actually using that animation code but rather PRO S 422 HQ. If you wanted to create your own preset, all you do is click on the drop down menu, come down to make template and then you could name your own preset. I don't need to do that though. So I'm gonna hit cancel when it come down here to pro res 422 HQ. And the next place you're gonna want to go is output two. This is where we decide where our time lapse is gonna go. And I already see that it's chosen my time lapse folder. So I'm just gonna go ahead and hit save, go ahead and save my project again, command or control. S if you're on a PC, I recommend at this point hitting the caps lock button. Once I click anywhere in my composition, it shows me that the preview render here has been disabled when you're rendering, you don't want anything hogging your resources more than it has to. So disabling that preview render is gonna save you some time. And if you're on a PC, the next step is to just hit render. If you are in a Mac, I'm gonna show you a different way to render your compositions. And this applies to more than just time lapse. This applies to motion graphics. Anything that you do in after effects should be rendered in the way that I'm about to show you. So make sure you saved your project. Go ahead and quit after effects. The next thing you're gonna wanna do is open up terminal if you don't have terminal down here, like I do just come to applications utilities terminal come back over to find her go applications after effects. And I want you to find A E render which is in the main folder A E render is actually responsible for rendering your aftereffects compositions. So go ahead and click drag over here to terminal. Go ahead and let go and then come over to terminal type minus project one space in between here and here. Come back over to find her. Go ahead and find your after effects project. Same thing. Click drag. Let go, go ahead and hit enter. Once terminal gets started rendering, you don't need to do anything else. Just make sure that all these different properties you had are what you actually wanted for your after effects composition, if not quit terminal immediately, otherwise just let it do its thing and it'll render perfectly for you now that our render is complete. Let's go ahead and check out our time lapse where back in the hills, little mouth in a steel, he brewed wide. Not until the sun went down a joke and he pass it. All right with that. We've come to the end of this tutorial. I hope you use this as a good starting point for your workflow in time lapse photography. Many thanks to Eric Kessler and Kessler Crane for sponsoring this video and for even just suggesting that I do a revised edition of my original tutorial if you've never been there. I definitely suggest that you check out Kesler U dot com. A great deal of content on the website does revolve around Kesler crane products, but it goes much further than that. It's a great resource for filmmakers. So I definitely recommend that you check that out. Thanks for watching. This is the Red Owl signing off. What? No. And 00, I don't like you real surge and father plays with me. We're looking, trying to book in with my PA cap for Cookie.