My first time lapse

One thing I’ve always wanted to do was try time lapse creation, so the other day I purchased a SHOOT MC-DC2 Timer Shutter Remote Control for my camera in order to take a picture every x number of seconds and setup for my first ever time lapse. Now while it’s not perfect, and I want to do better I did learn a-lot so I’m going to break down those lessons I learned to hopefully help others that make them.

First off even though you will be shooting with all manual settings and applying the same post production steps across your images, there will be flickering. This wasn’t something I had expected, so I did some research and ended up using GBDeflicker to reduce the amount of variance in the light levels of my images. This is ver important as it can be distracting to viewers. I found it was able to reduce it quite fast and was very effective. Note that I used the standalone app and not one of the ones that works as a plugin for Adobe CC. Below is an example video side by side of what their software does:

For video editing software I was using VSDC Free Video Editor. It is free though there are some caveats like that the free version doesn’t use hardware acceleration when rendering for example, and for some reason when I tried to buy it I couldn’t load their online store properly. Those points aside it’s a pretty good editor, though I did have issues where the first 30 or so frames would randomly get deleted, and because of that I was too scared to take the time to learn how to add a fade out to black to my video in fear that I would have to start over again (I had to start over many times because of this). But it gets the job done, and if they update it to fix that issue I would recommend it.

Finally you need to find some good music for your time lapse in order to make it more appealing. What I learned was that youtube actually provides a catalog of music for people to use here. Some songs do have licensing that requires you to add something to your description if you are going to monetize the video, but this is a great resource for people trying to find a song to use. In my video I chose “Sunrise on Mars” by Audionautix as it felt like it fit with the time lapse, however if I was doing a time lapse of passing cars I’d likely chose a different song.

And below you can see the final product. While not perfect, it was a good first try and I have learned a-lot about what I was trying to do. If you like it, or have any suggestions I’d love to hear them, so feel free to leave a comment.