Time Lapse from video (Automated)

[DaveYVR]

Hello,

Very new to video editing in general. Lamens terms would be appreciated in any responses.

I saw one topic on time lapse creation, but the responses seemed to be very manually intensive, and the topic was more focused on combining multiple images than starting with a continuous video. 

I'm wondering if someone else knows about an automated method that VideoPad may have recently added as a feature, plugin, or other more simple manual method than that discussed previously on these forums.

Thanks in advance,

Dave

[Nationalsolo]

Hi

Presumably by "Time Lapse" you mean a film made up of images taken at regular intervals throughout an event. e.g. a Flower opening or a building under construction. This usually involves exposing hundreds (if not thousands) of individual images. Usually this is done automatically within the camera that is making the video and not during editing.

In effect, with time lapse  you are speeding up the action. VP is quite capable of speeding up the action of a video clip but this means that you would have to film the whole event without a break from end to end continuously. Not very practical as the event might last several days (or weeks) However, if you have the images already...say taken by a still camera automatically exposing at regular intervals you can quite easily load these  into VP and create a time lapse clip. You can do this en bloc but they should be in order or alphabetically/or numerically named. here are the steps.....

• Decide on the Default still image duration and set this under Tools/Options/media (e.g. 2 images per seconds = 0.5)
• Use the Add file tab to load all the images to the image clip bin. (Select All and drag and drop directly into VP)
• Select them all in the bin (SHIFT and select first and last)
• Drag and Drop the selected files onto the timeline. They should now appear in order, each play for the time duration selected as the default in step 1..

If you should now decide the "lapse" is not correct and  want to change the duration for each image you will either have to start again and reset the default duration value before loading the images (Blast!!) or  individually change the duration of each image in storyboard mode (Double Blast!!)............

That might seem logical and of course will work, but much easier and quicker is to simply create a Sequence of your time lapse video and then reload the sequence back. (The timeline is cleared when you create the sequence)  As the sequence will now play as a single clip you can simply right click it and change the clip speed until it looks correct to you.

Hope this helps

Nat