Geminids Meteor Shower at Abbott Church Part 2

[JimFox]

Ben has gotten me excited to do more Timelapse videos.

This is from the Geminids Meteor shower at Abbott Church in Eastern Colorado. If you look close you will catch me ducking behind the church when I light up the inside for a few frames. There are also a few other photographers you will see in the background.

I used 700 frames for this one. After once again having issues with converting still photos to a Timelapse in Photoshop, I decided I would just load all of the still images into Movavi which I use for my video editing. It worked so simple, it's a shame it's not as straight forward in Photoshop to do. I just loaded all of the files, set the display time to .1 sec so basically it's going at 60fps, and then I rendered the video. I then closed Movavi, and loaded the created video into it and added the titles, transitions and music. It was so easy to do, I think I will just use Movavi from now to process my timelapse video's.

So here is the video. Some of you may not like the music, but I really like how the beat of the music times with the flashes of light in some of the frames, it's almost like the light pollution is synced to the music.

Jim

 

[Ben Egbert]

Great Jim, and I got you excited to do TL? Glad it happend. I have been using in camera, but I just shot 180 stills in interval mode and was just finished downloading. I was going to look up the tutorial Jameel shared which worked once for me, but maybe I will try Movavi. I still have not purchased it because I have not had much success with it yet. Maybe better input will help. I also need to learn how to downlaod music and embed it.

 

[Jim Sanderson]

Music works for me Jim. I’m going to have to give TL a try. This turned out nice.

 

[JimFox]

Great Jim, and I got you excited to do TL? Glad it happend. I have been using in camera, but I just shot 180 stills in interval mode and was just finished downloading. I was going to look up the tutorial Jameel shared which worked once for me, but maybe I will try Movavi. I still have not purchased it because I have not had much success with it yet. Maybe better input will help. I also need to learn how to downlaod music and embed it.

Hey Ben, thanks so much.

I don't think Movavi is designed for Timelapse, but since you can pull in stills with it, you can do them. And for not being designed for it, Movavi sure seems to create Timelapse easier then Photoshop.

I need to figure out how to video capture my screen, then I can do a quick tutorial on how to do it in Movavi.

As for Music, Movavi includes about 25 free music selections, and they are super easy to include into the movie.

 

[Ben Egbert]

Ok, I need to find a Movavo tutorial. I have been trying to do this mornings session with 180 raws for most of the morning. I have them all proccessed in ACR and converted to TIFF in a specail timelapse folder. I tried your acr method and it did not work, so I attempted Jameels, It will probably work, but it takes 1/2 hour just to load the TIFFs. and the first try did not work.

I will try Movavi later. I have attempted to include music from their library and it did not work. Probably because I don't know how to drive their menus. Software guys always do menus that are not intuitive to me.

 

[Jim Sanderson]

Hey Ben, thanks so much.

I don't think Movavi is designed for Timelapse, but since you can pull in stills with it, you can do them. And for not being designed for it, Movavi sure seems to create Timelapse easier then Photoshop.

I need to figure out how to video capture my screen, then I can do a quick tutorial on how to do it in Movavi.

As for Music, Movavi includes about 25 free music selections, and they are super easy to include into the movie.

.

The free version of DaVinci Resolve is also a good alternative, there is a bit of a learning curve though. I use the studio version.

 

[JimFox]

Ok, I need to find a Movavo tutorial. I have been trying to do this mornings session with 180 raws for most of the morning. I have them all proccessed in ACR and converted to TIFF in a specail timelapse folder. I tried your acr method and it did not work, so I attempted Jameels, It will probably work, but it takes 1/2 hour just to load the TIFFs. and the first try did not work.

I will try Movavi later. I have attempted to include music from their library and it did not work. Probably because I don't know how to drive their menus. Software guys always do menus that are not intuitive to me.

That was my problem. I ended up converting the RaWs to jpgs instead, and to load 1000 jpgs into a layered stack took forever. Everything took forever. It took over an hour to save the video I created, and then when i went to run it, Windows said the video was corrupted.

That’s why I am looking at alternatives for Timelapses, and for now I can use Movavi.

 

[Jameel Hyder]

Looks nice Jim. I had purchased Sony Vega many years ago for some video work I was doing for a project. Since then it is what I use for all video editing. Not the best alternative as things like Premiere and DaVinci are better alternatives now. I don't do video as much to want to buy another product or go through the learning curve.

Also video editing is pretty power hungry and so more CPU/GPU horsepower you throw at it, the less frustrating it is.

 

[Ben Egbert]

Ok, I processed 180 TIFFs that were full sized using Jameels reccomended tutorial in Photoshop. I had to view the tutorial a few times. This is two sets of 90 images each for 180 total. There was a time lapse between them and you will see the change about half way through. I renamed them in ACR to get a non broken sequence, this seems to be important. Please ignore the quality, it was a boring morning and hardly any changes during the sequence, just a test. But it works, and gave me a feeling for a large stack of full size images. I did the processing as a batch in ACR and saved as TIFF. Next time I may save as JPG.

Next task is to try this in Movavi. But Christmas activities are calling to me.

Christmas tl - YouTube

 

[Ben Egbert]

Here is the tutorial I used.

Time-lapse photography tutorial in Photoshop - PhotoshopCAFE

 

[AlanLichty]

Interesting exercise. The number of people and light that come and go seems a bit distracting however.

I am curious about an odd circular sky event at about the 49-50 second mark just above and to the left of the chapel.

 

[JimFox]

Interesting exercise. The number of people and light that come and go seems a bit distracting however.

I am curious about an odd circular sky event at about the 49-50 second mark just above and to the left of the chapel.

Oh yeah, I had forgotten about that. It's so weird huh? When I saw the first frame or two of it last week I thought it was maybe a bird or bug flying in front of the camera and getting lit up. But it's definitely not that as whatever it is kind of seems to explode and get that expanding circular pattern.

Maybe because I made it, I find the people kind of funny and there is enough action in the sky that I at least don't get too distracted.

 

[JimFox]

Here is the tutorial I used.

Time-lapse photography tutorial in Photoshop - PhotoshopCAFE

Ben that's a tutorial I used as well, but I can't get the photoshop part to work, not sure what I am missing.

Here are the steps listed in the tutorial:

PROCESSING
If you want to edit the images, open one in camera raw and make your adjustments. Save a preset. Go to Bridge and apply the preset by selecting all the images and right-clicking. Choose Develop Setting and choose your Preset, it will be applied to all the image. The other Option is to edit one of the images in Lightroom and them sync the settings to the other images.

In Photoshop, choose image>open navigate to your folder of images.

Choose the first image in the sequence only (don’t select all the images, or Photoshop will try to make a time-lapse sequence foreach of the images, and you will have a mess. )

Click the button at the bottom of the import dialog box that says “image sequence” (If the sequence is broken, the video shows how to repair the naming)

Click ok and select a frame-rate when prompted.

24|FPS is common for Cinema, what you see at the movies. 30|FPS is common for video and what you see on TV.

Open the Timeline (Window>Timeline) And press the spacebar of play button to view the time-lapse.


In the timeline window it would only show me the first frame, and the video had a length of like 0.1 secs. So that means it didn't pull in the rest of the images in the sequence to the video, but they did load as they are all listed in the layer stack on the right side. They just never are pulled into the timeline. It's been super frustrating for me.

 

[JimFox]

Looks nice Jim. I had purchased Sony Vega many years ago for some video work I was doing for a project. Since then it is what I use for all video editing. Not the best alternative as things like Premiere and DaVinci are better alternatives now. I don't do video as much to want to buy another product or go through the learning curve.

Also video editing is pretty power hungry and so more CPU/GPU horsepower you throw at it, the less frustrating it is.

I am sure Movavi is not as powerful as like Premiere eiher, but probably like your Sony Vega, it handles video's with simple ease. At least at this point in playing with Timelapses I just need something simple and consistent.

 

[JimFox]

Music works for me Jim. I’m going to have to give TL a try. This turned out nice.

You should Jim, it seems like a bunch of us are having fun with it. It's a nice change of pace, and especially if you have a 2nd body, it makes it that much easier.

 

[Ben Egbert]

Jim, looks like the same steps I used, but mine worked. I did use 24FPS however and I did rename to get them in an unbroken sequence.

I just finished doing a Movavi and managed to get music attached. I am not sure why, but it zooms in and out. Now I need to purchase the program and learn how to download my own music, not too fond of what they have.

 

[JimFox]

That's great you used Movavi Ben. If it zooms in and out then it's because you added a transition that zooms in and out.

It's funny that when I searched for Timelapse in Movavi today it showed me the same steps that I had taken. So the makers of Movavi are acknowledging that it can be used for Timelapses. Which is great as I wasn't positive at first if I was just making it do something they hadn't perhaps intended.

 

[Ben Egbert]

I have one issue. It plays back for 12 minutes, which is the same as the time it took to take the images. I have it set for 24FPS. I have done it twice and it always does this. The first one that zoom in and out is the correct short length, but I can't duplicate that.

 

[Beth]

the cloud layer going through this one is pretty cool.

 

[JimFox]

the cloud layer going through this one is pretty cool.

Awe, thanks so much!