Making and Saving a Time Lapse Video:
Once you’ve taken a long series of photos with your camera and intervalometer, you’ll need to use your computer to turn it into a movie. Do not worry if you have hundreds and hundreds of photos it is very easy to do. Above is a video showing the process below I will outline step by step instructions. There are several ways to do this, I am only detailing the most likely way you will be doing it. *You must have Quicktime Player 7. Quicktime Player v10.0 will not work. If you don’t know which quicktime you have, open it, click Quicktime in the top tool bar, then About Quicktime Player. There you will see the version.
- Open Quicktime Player 7
- Choose “File”, “Open Image Sequence”
- Locate the folder containing your time lapse photos, click the first photo in the sequence only
- Click “Open”
- Choose your desired video frame rate from the drop down menu.
- Choose “File”, “Save As”
- Name your video and save it somewhere on your hard drive as “Self-contained movie”
Tips:
Keep your camera folders organized while shooting it will save you a lot of time when you get back to the computer. Test your shots and as soon as you are ready to start your time lapse create a new folder. You can find on article on how to do this here: How to Prepare Camera Folders for Time Lapses
Most likely your video will be too large to play smoothly. This depends on your picture size. An 18 Mega Pixel photo will be roughly 5184 x 3456 pixels. HD Video is only 1920 x 1080, so you can see why your computer might have a hard time with playback. But don’t worry this is part of the process and only the first time you save your time lapse without any compressions yet. Keep this High Resolution original as your “control“. You can scale down copies of it when you edit at any time, even zoom up and pan around to some degree and still have full HD.
When shooting pictures for a time-lapse sequence, there’s a few quick steps you should always take before ever clicking the shutter. The simple process outlined below will keep each of your time-lapses isolated in its own folder. This will save you time later when you take the steps necessary in QuickTime 7 Pro to turn your sequence of photos into a beautiful time-lapse video. There are a lot of pictures but you will get through the following steps very very quickly.
- Getting started
- Creating a new folder
- Shooting in your new folder
- Multiple time-lapse folders
For this example I will be using and referring to the settings of a Canon 7D menu. The process is nearly identical for Canon 5D models and the concept can be applied to most DSLRs of any make.
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Step 1: Getting started
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The first thing you need to do is check what’s already on your CF (memory card) card. So lets say you turn on your camera and have got a picture you took of some architecture. If you can start by formatting your memory card beforehand, great. If not, that’s okay too. Feel free to take as many pictures or video at this point, now would be a good time to practice your shots. In my example the memory card only contains the above shot, you may have dozens or hundreds of pictures and even videos. If you have not edited your camera folders before then everything will be in one folder and you can continue shooting as you please. Push the MENU button on your camera and then use the pictures below to navigate to your folder menu.
You should see that you have one folder, 100EOS7D. This is your default folder. The first three digits of this folder may vary, but as long as only one folder is listed then you’re ready to move on to the next step. If you have multiple folders listed already then reformat your memory card if possible. If you’d rather not format your card at this point you can continue with this tutorial anyway, keep in mind you will have a few extra folders which maybe confusing later on.
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Step 2: Creating a new folder
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When you’re ready to start taking pictures for a time-lapse sequence create a new folder. Scroll down to CREATE FOLDER and select it by pushing the SET button.
