**Creating a Time-Lapse Video using After Effects**

If you're interested in creating a time-lapse video, one of the most effective tools to use is Adobe After Effects. In this article, we'll go through the process of creating a time-lapse video using After Effects.

First things first, it's always a good idea to plan out your composition before starting to work on your time-lapse video. This means selecting a dark image as a base for your composition, and then dragging your playhead across to where the Sun comes up. This will help you determine the framing and cropping of your final composition.

Once you're happy with your composition, you can scale it up just a little bit to get it to the right size. You may also want to adjust the default duration of 1 minute and 30 seconds for the composition to ensure that it's aligned with the actual end time of your video.

**Adjusting the Composition**

Before exporting from After Effects, make sure that you're happy with the composition. If there are any issues with exposure or brightness, now is the time to address them. In this case, we can see that the image is a bit blown out at the end, so we'll use part of that in our final video.

**Rendering the Video**

To render your time-lapse video, you need to add it to the render queue. To do this, go to the top of the composition panel and click on "Add to Render Queue." This will add the video to the queue, where you can adjust other settings before rendering.

You'll also want to make sure that you're using the correct codec and format for your output. In this case, we're using ProRes 4:2, which is a high-quality codec that's well-suited for time-lapse videos. Make sure that the format option is set to QuickTime, and then select the ProRes 4:2 codec.

**Outputting the Video**

Once you've adjusted your settings, click "OK" to confirm your changes. Next, you'll need to specify where you want to output your video file. You can choose a location on your desktop or in a folder of your choice. Make sure that you name your file something descriptive and clear, so that it's easy to identify.

Finally, click "Render" to start the video rendering process. This may take some time, depending on the length and complexity of your time-lapse video.

**Additional Resources**

If you're interested in learning more about time-lapse photography and getting into advanced techniques, we recommend checking out lynda.com. Lynda.com has an extensive library of online video training courses that cover a wide range of topics related to time-lapse photography, including time-lapse recording basics, creating a time-lapse video, and even advanced techniques like shooting with electric cranes.

In addition to the tutorials on lynda.com, you can also find many other resources online, including YouTube videos, blogs, and forums. These can be a great way to learn from other photographers and get tips and advice on how to improve your time-lapse photography skills.

**Conclusion**

Time-lapse photography is a fascinating field that requires patience, attention to detail, and a good understanding of the technical aspects of video production. By following these steps and practicing regularly, you can create stunning time-lapse videos that showcase your creativity and skill. Remember to always experiment with different techniques and settings, and don't be afraid to try new things – it's all part of the learning process.

As an artist, I've found that working with time-lapse video has opened up a whole new world of creative possibilities for me. By using this technique, I can create videos that are both visually stunning and narratively engaging, making them perfect for use in films, videos, or even social media content.

**About the Author**

The author of this article is an experienced photographer and videographer who has been working with time-lapse photography for several years. He's passionate about sharing his knowledge and expertise with other photographers and videographers, and hopes that this article will inspire readers to try their hand at creating their own time-lapse videos.

**Special Thanks**

We'd like to extend a special thank you to our sponsor, lynda.com, for providing us with access to their extensive library of online video training courses. Their resources have been invaluable in helping us improve our skills and stay up-to-date with the latest techniques and technologies in time-lapse photography.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enin the last video we talked about different ways that you can capture time-lapse footage and if for some reason you missed that video I will link it up in the description in this video I want to talk about how we're going to use editing software to stitch that together and we're going to start in Lightroom now in Lightroom I have already imported my images and I didn't mention this in the last video but I like to shoot RAW format when I can we're going to export this as a JPEG sequence but I have a little more control over the Edit of the actual sequence if I shoot in RAW and so I know it takes up more space but I will go ahead and start there the first thing I would do is once you've imported all of your images is under sort here just make sure it's sorted by filename because the file names are numbered and you want to look at this you know in order if you can and so I will scroll down to the middle of the sequence and I will pick an image and what I will do is I'll hit D on the keyboard this will take me into the develop mode and this is where I'm going to make my adjustments now this is a little bit unconventional for a time-lapse this is one I shot really early this morning at about 6 o'clock when the Sun was coming up so the exposure in this time-lapse actually changes over the course of the sequence so I'm not going to make any dramatic exposure changes even though this image is probably a little bit dark that is unconventional normally you have your exposure locked in and you can go ahead make your exposure adjustments I'm going to go ahead on this image I've made my white balance adjustments any tonal adjustments you want to make you can also use plugins and presets which is kind of cool if you're going to use plugins that emulate film the only thing I would advise to be careful with is that you go back in after you've applied the preset and turn all the grain off the reason you want to do that is this film presets will apply the same grain pattern to every image and that does not look natural in the end in the end you want a very smooth time-lapse in the way film actually looks as the grain structures different on every frame and so what I will do is I'll use a preset sometimes to emulate a film look but I will go in and turn the grain off and then I'll use a plugin in the video editor later and apply the grain there if that's what I want to do so anyway other than that we're good to go what you're going to do at this point is hit shift command C on the keyboard and what this does is this brings up the copy settings panel and I pretty much have everything selected we're going to copy all of those settings we're going to go back to the library you want to select all of your images at this point and once you have them all selected I would hit shift command V to paste and that will paste your settings across all the images in the sequence and now we have a uniform edited sequence that we're ready to export and turn into a video there's a couple different options you can use to actually stitch this together and make your image sequence a video and I want to start with one that is free and is available for both Mac and Windows and is called MPEG stream clip this is made by a company called squared v I'll put the link in the description when you open up MPEG stream clip and this is actually if you're working with video at all this is a really nice little Swiss Army knife at least to do conversions and stuff that you can use I'm going to actually use it for the time-lapse sequence and I have a couple time-lapse sequences here and so what I'm going to do is for instance let's open this one here I'm going to select all of my images and what I'm going to do is I'm going to drag and drop those onto impact string clip and what it's going to do is it's going to take a couple seconds while it sorts the order the other thing that's really important is when you export your files is make sure that I use the original name as they come off the camera because the software does need to see that as an image sequence and it will put it in the right order and so once this is done thinking it is done and now I am ready to export my sequence now an impact stream clip you're going to go under the file menu and I'm going to say on the Mac I would say export to QuickTime because I work on the Mac I tend to do all my video in a codec called Pro res 4 2 2 and so what I'm going to do is go through here and actually go up here select Apple ProRes 4 2 2 and what I'm going to need to do is enter a framerate and we talked about framerate in the last video I'm shooting everything at 23.976 which is the US film standard if you're shooting for TV would be 29.97 and so on and so forth if you're in Europe it's 25 anyway we're good to go there I don't need interlace scaling so I'm going to deselect that and then what you're going to see is some frame size options now you can go in here and you can actually resize this too HD or you know 1920 by 1080 or 1280 by 720 depending what you're doing what it's going to do is it's going to crop in on the footage that you've got and I don't want it to do that I would rather do that in post-production so I will go ahead and export that unscaled it'll take a minute depending on how much resolution you had on your camera but that's really the way I prefer to do it is do my resizing there because if I need to zoom in or I need to move around or crop or whatever I want to be able to control that and that's one of the things that impacts string clip does not have as a preview window necessarily for that the only other thing I would recommend and you can play with this a little bit when right under framerate there's an option for frame blending and if you get what this does is no help think says provides better motion when changing the frame rate but in the case of a time-lapse what's going to do is sometimes if you've got trees in your time-lapse people that are walking around your footage can be a little bit jerky especially if you shoot at a high shutter speed you don't have any of that motion blur going on you can actually take the frame blending box and what that will do is it'll kind of blend the frames together and it'll give you a little bit smoother time-lapse overall I tend to experiment on a case-by-case basis if my time-lapse is a little choppy I'll select frame blending and I'll export from there so that's one thing that you can do when you're done you just say make movie and it's going to export a pro rs-422 QuickTime file which is what I prefer to work in if you're on Windows you may have trouble because this is an Apple propriété codec and there are other things you can work in you can use animation you can use an AVI file whatever you want to do from there another way to stitch together a time-lapse and this is actually my preferred method because you have a lot more control over it is to use After Effects After Effects is part of the Adobe Creative Suite and it is excellent does cost money but you have a lot of control and a lot of options in here I'm gonna show you how to do this in After Effects when After Effects opens what I'm going to do is say create new composition and it will default to the last setup that I had you want to make sure this is set up to how you want it so when 1920 by 1080 will do an HD time-lapse here framerate I'm going to set to 23.976 say ok and it's going to set up my composition the next thing you want to do is import that image sequence and the way you're going to do that is if I right click in the project pane over here I'm going to get a little menu whoops and I'm going to go down to import and I'm going to say file not multiple files and I know that's a little weird but we're going to import this as a sequence so you just want to select File or it's also command or control I I'm going to go over to my time-lapse folder and I'm just going to select the first image not all of them and if I look down here on this open pane it also says notice esses JPEG sequence is checked and so what that's going to do is all I have to do is say this is the first image and it's going to grab all the numerical names after that go ahead and say open and it has now brought in to our project folder that image sequence notice it has a little icon for that the next thing I want to do is you want to right-click on this and go down to interpret footage and I'll show you what this does if you say main it's going to say basically okay I have an image sequence what is the frame rate and there's some other options too but the frame rates the one we're concerned with and it defaults to 30 frames a second which is going to mismatch the time it'll still work but what I want to do is I want to set this to 24 frames a second because that's where I'm working right now I'm going to go ahead and say okay and now I'm ready to add this to our composition so I'm going to grab the image sequence drag it down here onto the composition and we have now inserted it if you want to scale this I want to go ahead and hit s on the keyboard and that brings up my scale here I'm going to lock those in and then you can adjust your scale you can move this around and remember this is the sequence that I did is the Sun was coming up so this is kind of dark image so I probably want to drag my playhead across to where the Sun comes up and make sure that that's kind of the composition that I like kind of the framing cropping there I'm going to scale it up just a little bit and I'm fairly happy with that and we are ready to export from here the only other thing I would recommend is the default is a minute and a half on the composition so I would drag this small slider over here the work area and and I'll just bring that down a little closer to where the actual composition of the time-lapse ends this one does blow out at the end but I knew it would and I'm just going to use part of that in there okay so now we are ready to render this so what you want to do is go under composition at the top and you want to say add to render queue this will add it to the render queue and you want to adjust a couple other things on your output module make sure this is codec you want to use I already have one set up for Perez 4 to 2 but if it's not selected you can select your format is going to be QuickTime format options I'm going to make sure I have Perez 4 to 2 selected say ok and we're going to say ok here and then you're going to say where do you want to output it to and I'll put that on the desktop or a folder where I know where it is I'll probably rename it and then once you're done you'll go ahead and say render and it's going to go through the motions it's going to render out your video file and it'll make your done noise when it's done and we now have a video file of our time-lapse another resource that I would direct you guys to if you're interested in learning more about time-lapse photography and getting into some more advanced techniques on this is actually lynda.com and if you're not familiar with lynda.com they have I believe one of the most extensive training libraries that you're going to find anywhere and if you go to lynda.com and I'm just going to search for time-lapse and let's see what comes up a bunch of stuff and they have a number of wonderful online video training on doing time lapses and you know if you want to get into some more stuff you can do in After Effects for instance they have one on making shadow studies time lapse recording basics creating a time lapse video they've got a ton of stuff in here and they've got some more advanced techniques too there's some great stuff on shooting a time-lapse from a movie like storytelling techniques and if you want to get into you know electric cranes and stuff that will actually move the camera during the time lapse there's some really nice titles on that lynda.com our sponsor of the show and they have a deal right now for artificial fevers where you can actually get ten days of free unlimited access to the entire website so if you're interested in learning more about time-lapse video or learning how to do a hyper lapse I would definitely check lend out and if you want to take advantage of the free trial for ten days what I would do is go to the following link it's going to be lynda.com slash AOP that is Lynda with a why lynda.com slash AOP that lets Lynda know that I sent you and you're going to get a ten day free trial and you can check all this stuff out for yourself and so I want to quickly give another special shout out and thanks to the folks at Lynda for once again sponsoring another episode of the art of photography so we've done two videos now on time-lapse photography and I'd be curious to know if you guys would like to see some more on this time-lapse is really interesting it's something that I've done a lot of in the last couple months because I've wanted to use it as a tool to stitch together scenes and stuff that I do in the videos that I do here and it's really interesting when you get into it that you kind of quickly exhaust your first ideas of time lapses and then to get into it and really explore the whole idea of with an image to be able to compress time in a video format and there's a whole art side to that to which I would be happy to talk about if you guys are interested in that so make sure you leave me a comment and let me know what you all think and that's about all I've got today if you guys enjoyed this episode please remember to like it and share it your friends and is always subscribed to the art of photography you got to subscribe that way you'll always be up-to-date to all the latest and greatest stuff that we do here until the next video I'll see you laterin the last video we talked about different ways that you can capture time-lapse footage and if for some reason you missed that video I will link it up in the description in this video I want to talk about how we're going to use editing software to stitch that together and we're going to start in Lightroom now in Lightroom I have already imported my images and I didn't mention this in the last video but I like to shoot RAW format when I can we're going to export this as a JPEG sequence but I have a little more control over the Edit of the actual sequence if I shoot in RAW and so I know it takes up more space but I will go ahead and start there the first thing I would do is once you've imported all of your images is under sort here just make sure it's sorted by filename because the file names are numbered and you want to look at this you know in order if you can and so I will scroll down to the middle of the sequence and I will pick an image and what I will do is I'll hit D on the keyboard this will take me into the develop mode and this is where I'm going to make my adjustments now this is a little bit unconventional for a time-lapse this is one I shot really early this morning at about 6 o'clock when the Sun was coming up so the exposure in this time-lapse actually changes over the course of the sequence so I'm not going to make any dramatic exposure changes even though this image is probably a little bit dark that is unconventional normally you have your exposure locked in and you can go ahead make your exposure adjustments I'm going to go ahead on this image I've made my white balance adjustments any tonal adjustments you want to make you can also use plugins and presets which is kind of cool if you're going to use plugins that emulate film the only thing I would advise to be careful with is that you go back in after you've applied the preset and turn all the grain off the reason you want to do that is this film presets will apply the same grain pattern to every image and that does not look natural in the end in the end you want a very smooth time-lapse in the way film actually looks as the grain structures different on every frame and so what I will do is I'll use a preset sometimes to emulate a film look but I will go in and turn the grain off and then I'll use a plugin in the video editor later and apply the grain there if that's what I want to do so anyway other than that we're good to go what you're going to do at this point is hit shift command C on the keyboard and what this does is this brings up the copy settings panel and I pretty much have everything selected we're going to copy all of those settings we're going to go back to the library you want to select all of your images at this point and once you have them all selected I would hit shift command V to paste and that will paste your settings across all the images in the sequence and now we have a uniform edited sequence that we're ready to export and turn into a video there's a couple different options you can use to actually stitch this together and make your image sequence a video and I want to start with one that is free and is available for both Mac and Windows and is called MPEG stream clip this is made by a company called squared v I'll put the link in the description when you open up MPEG stream clip and this is actually if you're working with video at all this is a really nice little Swiss Army knife at least to do conversions and stuff that you can use I'm going to actually use it for the time-lapse sequence and I have a couple time-lapse sequences here and so what I'm going to do is for instance let's open this one here I'm going to select all of my images and what I'm going to do is I'm going to drag and drop those onto impact string clip and what it's going to do is it's going to take a couple seconds while it sorts the order the other thing that's really important is when you export your files is make sure that I use the original name as they come off the camera because the software does need to see that as an image sequence and it will put it in the right order and so once this is done thinking it is done and now I am ready to export my sequence now an impact stream clip you're going to go under the file menu and I'm going to say on the Mac I would say export to QuickTime because I work on the Mac I tend to do all my video in a codec called Pro res 4 2 2 and so what I'm going to do is go through here and actually go up here select Apple ProRes 4 2 2 and what I'm going to need to do is enter a framerate and we talked about framerate in the last video I'm shooting everything at 23.976 which is the US film standard if you're shooting for TV would be 29.97 and so on and so forth if you're in Europe it's 25 anyway we're good to go there I don't need interlace scaling so I'm going to deselect that and then what you're going to see is some frame size options now you can go in here and you can actually resize this too HD or you know 1920 by 1080 or 1280 by 720 depending what you're doing what it's going to do is it's going to crop in on the footage that you've got and I don't want it to do that I would rather do that in post-production so I will go ahead and export that unscaled it'll take a minute depending on how much resolution you had on your camera but that's really the way I prefer to do it is do my resizing there because if I need to zoom in or I need to move around or crop or whatever I want to be able to control that and that's one of the things that impacts string clip does not have as a preview window necessarily for that the only other thing I would recommend and you can play with this a little bit when right under framerate there's an option for frame blending and if you get what this does is no help think says provides better motion when changing the frame rate but in the case of a time-lapse what's going to do is sometimes if you've got trees in your time-lapse people that are walking around your footage can be a little bit jerky especially if you shoot at a high shutter speed you don't have any of that motion blur going on you can actually take the frame blending box and what that will do is it'll kind of blend the frames together and it'll give you a little bit smoother time-lapse overall I tend to experiment on a case-by-case basis if my time-lapse is a little choppy I'll select frame blending and I'll export from there so that's one thing that you can do when you're done you just say make movie and it's going to export a pro rs-422 QuickTime file which is what I prefer to work in if you're on Windows you may have trouble because this is an Apple propriété codec and there are other things you can work in you can use animation you can use an AVI file whatever you want to do from there another way to stitch together a time-lapse and this is actually my preferred method because you have a lot more control over it is to use After Effects After Effects is part of the Adobe Creative Suite and it is excellent does cost money but you have a lot of control and a lot of options in here I'm gonna show you how to do this in After Effects when After Effects opens what I'm going to do is say create new composition and it will default to the last setup that I had you want to make sure this is set up to how you want it so when 1920 by 1080 will do an HD time-lapse here framerate I'm going to set to 23.976 say ok and it's going to set up my composition the next thing you want to do is import that image sequence and the way you're going to do that is if I right click in the project pane over here I'm going to get a little menu whoops and I'm going to go down to import and I'm going to say file not multiple files and I know that's a little weird but we're going to import this as a sequence so you just want to select File or it's also command or control I I'm going to go over to my time-lapse folder and I'm just going to select the first image not all of them and if I look down here on this open pane it also says notice esses JPEG sequence is checked and so what that's going to do is all I have to do is say this is the first image and it's going to grab all the numerical names after that go ahead and say open and it has now brought in to our project folder that image sequence notice it has a little icon for that the next thing I want to do is you want to right-click on this and go down to interpret footage and I'll show you what this does if you say main it's going to say basically okay I have an image sequence what is the frame rate and there's some other options too but the frame rates the one we're concerned with and it defaults to 30 frames a second which is going to mismatch the time it'll still work but what I want to do is I want to set this to 24 frames a second because that's where I'm working right now I'm going to go ahead and say okay and now I'm ready to add this to our composition so I'm going to grab the image sequence drag it down here onto the composition and we have now inserted it if you want to scale this I want to go ahead and hit s on the keyboard and that brings up my scale here I'm going to lock those in and then you can adjust your scale you can move this around and remember this is the sequence that I did is the Sun was coming up so this is kind of dark image so I probably want to drag my playhead across to where the Sun comes up and make sure that that's kind of the composition that I like kind of the framing cropping there I'm going to scale it up just a little bit and I'm fairly happy with that and we are ready to export from here the only other thing I would recommend is the default is a minute and a half on the composition so I would drag this small slider over here the work area and and I'll just bring that down a little closer to where the actual composition of the time-lapse ends this one does blow out at the end but I knew it would and I'm just going to use part of that in there okay so now we are ready to render this so what you want to do is go under composition at the top and you want to say add to render queue this will add it to the render queue and you want to adjust a couple other things on your output module make sure this is codec you want to use I already have one set up for Perez 4 to 2 but if it's not selected you can select your format is going to be QuickTime format options I'm going to make sure I have Perez 4 to 2 selected say ok and we're going to say ok here and then you're going to say where do you want to output it to and I'll put that on the desktop or a folder where I know where it is I'll probably rename it and then once you're done you'll go ahead and say render and it's going to go through the motions it's going to render out your video file and it'll make your done noise when it's done and we now have a video file of our time-lapse another resource that I would direct you guys to if you're interested in learning more about time-lapse photography and getting into some more advanced techniques on this is actually lynda.com and if you're not familiar with lynda.com they have I believe one of the most extensive training libraries that you're going to find anywhere and if you go to lynda.com and I'm just going to search for time-lapse and let's see what comes up a bunch of stuff and they have a number of wonderful online video training on doing time lapses and you know if you want to get into some more stuff you can do in After Effects for instance they have one on making shadow studies time lapse recording basics creating a time lapse video they've got a ton of stuff in here and they've got some more advanced techniques too there's some great stuff on shooting a time-lapse from a movie like storytelling techniques and if you want to get into you know electric cranes and stuff that will actually move the camera during the time lapse there's some really nice titles on that lynda.com our sponsor of the show and they have a deal right now for artificial fevers where you can actually get ten days of free unlimited access to the entire website so if you're interested in learning more about time-lapse video or learning how to do a hyper lapse I would definitely check lend out and if you want to take advantage of the free trial for ten days what I would do is go to the following link it's going to be lynda.com slash AOP that is Lynda with a why lynda.com slash AOP that lets Lynda know that I sent you and you're going to get a ten day free trial and you can check all this stuff out for yourself and so I want to quickly give another special shout out and thanks to the folks at Lynda for once again sponsoring another episode of the art of photography so we've done two videos now on time-lapse photography and I'd be curious to know if you guys would like to see some more on this time-lapse is really interesting it's something that I've done a lot of in the last couple months because I've wanted to use it as a tool to stitch together scenes and stuff that I do in the videos that I do here and it's really interesting when you get into it that you kind of quickly exhaust your first ideas of time lapses and then to get into it and really explore the whole idea of with an image to be able to compress time in a video format and there's a whole art side to that to which I would be happy to talk about if you guys are interested in that so make sure you leave me a comment and let me know what you all think and that's about all I've got today if you guys enjoyed this episode please remember to like it and share it your friends and is always subscribed to the art of photography you got to subscribe that way you'll always be up-to-date to all the latest and greatest stuff that we do here until the next video I'll see you later\n"