Creating the movie
Once you have the set of still images, the final
piece of the puzzle is to create a movie to show
the time-lapse. The movie is made by using soft-
ware that combines the individual images as a
movie file, with each image becoming a frame of
the movie. It is helpful to have the files ready to
go before actually creating the movie. The key is
to keep the images in sequential order with
sequential filenames. When I download the
images from a time-lapse into my computer, I
place them into a separate folder. That means
that only the files that will be used to create the
movie are there and they are in sequence. You
should also change the name on import into
something a little more meaningful. For example,
I might change the name to Sunset_TL_(date)_
(sequence #) so that I know that these are the
files for the sunset time-lapse taken on a specific
date, as well as the order of the files. As you can
see in Figure 7-15, this allows me to keep all the
files together.
The next step is to combine these images into a
movie, and one of the easiest ways to do this is
with the full version of Adobe Photoshop. (Adobe
Photoshop Elements doesn’t have this capability.)
If you have the full version of Photoshop, just do
the following to create your movie:- Open Photoshop.
- Choose File ➪ Open.
- Navigate to the folder that contains your
time-lapse images and click the first image. - Click the check box that says image sequence.
- Click Open. A pop-up menu appears and
asks you for the frame rate. - Enter the frame rate from the calculations
you made when capturing the image. I usually
use 24 frames per second. The image opens. - Compose the scene and set the focus to
manual. - Set the white balance.
- Set the exposure.
- Fire the remote and make sure the tripod
doesn’t move. You can see how the tripod
is set up with the remote attached in
Figure 7-14.
That’s it for the photo side of things; now you
have to put it all together and create an actual
movie.
ABOUT THIS PHOTO The tripod is firmly planted on the rocks
by the beach, ready to start capturing a sunset. Taken at 1/80 second,
f/4.5, and ISO 500.
7-14