Time has lapsed since I shot my first time lapse. (Get it? Ha... Ok, so it's not that funny.) Shot my first time lapse back in May, when I shot my first HDR images. Shooting it was the easy part. Made a few mistakes, but it went fine. That was nearly 6 months ago. Actually making it into a video was an arduous, painful task.
The only thing I really had to put it together was Adobe Premiere Elements. I wasn't really sure that was the right program, but seeing as how I was just starting out with time lapses I didn't want to spend more money on programs that I weren't sure would be any better. I got some help from other photogs at Sportsshooter, and thru a lot of trial and error in the program figured out what I was doing.
I think the main problem with Premiere Elements, and the Elements series of programs in general is they kind of dumb things down seeing as how they aren't meant for professionals. The learning curve on a professional quality program is usually longer but there are more options, allowing a producer to get a good quality result. Premiere Elements is prob fine for basic video use and still photos of several seconds each. Try and have a still photo shown for a millisecond, that's where the problem arises. I finally achieved the result I was looking for tho.
After finishing it I realized we have Imovie on one of the laptops at the Tribune, which is what I've seen a lot of time lapses produced with. Thru the process of using Premiere tho I realized it does appear to have some advantages over Imovie. Premiere has three tracks for video/stills and three tracks for audio, where as Imovie only has one track for each. I didn't get into Imovie enough to confirm this, but blending and transitions for the audio and video seems difficult. With Premiere it's just a matter of overlapping the sequences which makes the video flow better I think as opposed to hard transitions between sequences. It's all just really a matter of opinion and taste, to each his own.
Here's the link for Vimeo. Please check it out, if you're a member of Vimeo please leave some comments on the page. Otherwise feel free to leave a comment here.
