How to Take a Perfect Hyper-lapse
From the first Hyperlapse i’ve seen i’ve always been enamoured by them.
I just think they’re so cool, like the fact you can string 300 to 500 photos (Even more) together and come out with this crazy looking timelapse just get’s me excited.
Especially when you time your shutter speed to showcase more movement in the subjects passing through the frame.
With my new camera i’ve finally decided to take it upon myself to attempt to make my own Hyperlapse. After watching a few Youtube videos that basically all said the same thing, being that they’re incredibly simple and easy to do I had the motivation to just leave my house and do it.
I found an alleyway, took one step forward every photo and got 120 photos to take back to Finalcut Pro and make my creation.
It was pretty horrible needless to say…
It’s wobbly, not stabilized, and doesn’t really have a subject to focus on.
So I decided to try again.
This time I sat in my window, rested the camera on my Knee (Cause my Tripod is broken even though it’s brand new), and attempted to grab the Hyperlapse.
I have it posted on my Instagram here:
So most noticeable problems include, the fact the camera has movement, the flickering in the sky, and the choppy movements of the subjects in frame.
These all happen to be common problems with Hyperlapses, and the difference between this Hyperlapse (A.k.a. a 6/10), and a Hyperlapse that’s a 10/10, like say from Mikevisuals in his Tokyo part 1 Vlog (Which you all should check out by the way) I’ll note below.
So, What Can we Learn from the Pro’s?
1. Focus in on your subject
What I mean is that when you are picking an object or subject to hyperlapse you have to make sure you have reference points. I would highly recomend turning grid mode on for your camera and using the intersection between horizontal and vertical grid lines to line up on some standardized point.
By doing so you reduce the amount of movement and shake that you will capture while take a successive amount of pictures.
For example: Focus your center focus point on a clock and use the cross section of vertical and horizontal to line up on the middle of the clock and not move from that position.
2. Don’t auto-align your images in post.
What I did for my first two was bring my images into lightroom first and cropped and linked up the photos with the auto align tool. Lightroom is going to arbitrarily line up the photos irrespective of the perspective of the previous photo.
Now technically if you have done step 1 correctly this step won’t matter. But I found that it will still adjust the photo.
The result dramatically affects the next tip
3. Don’t use auto-stabilization
Now I use Final Cut Pro to edit my videos, and there are four options when stabilizing your photos. The default is the automatic stabilization… and it sucks. The best to use is the Inertia feature, which greatly enhances the smoothness of your string of images.
You can also manually place control points on parts of your subject to auto align the pictures around. I think that if you weren’t able to properly complete step 1 this would be useful for a very important reason.
If you have shaky footage, final cut will place black bars around the images as you play the hyperlapse because of the warp it is putting on each photo to change it into one seamless and shakeless video.
This is the most critical mistake in my first hyper-lapse.
The black bars also existed in my second hyper-lapse but I was rescued by the crop which blocked out the bars when I uploaded it to instagram.
4. Slow down your Shutter Speed
When you slow down your shutter speed you are able to get a substantial amount of motion blurr on your subjects moving through the frame. This makes the hyper-lapse look a lot smoother and cleaner instead of very choppy with just successive shots of people walking or cars driving for instance.
It also helps to showcase movement of moving objects better, for instance the cars in my post below!
5. Incorporate Movement if you can, but Tripods are cool too
I think there is a time and place when you should use a tri-pod for making a hyperlapse. One of them being if you are trying to showcase time passing by. But in many Youtube videos the hyperlapses themselves have a direction they travel into, whether it is forward, backward, to the side etc…
I think this movement creates a more dynamic pacing and honestly just makes the hyper-lapse look a whole lot more interesting
The final product displaying my Hyper-lapse skills now looks like this:
Notice how there is still a flicker? That’s because what I didn’t know is that the auto-lock feature on the aperture doesn’t function on my camera like how I thought. Essentially when I auto locked it, the camera fixes the aperture, but every photo re-initializes towards that aperture rather than keeping the aperture consistent the entire duration of the hyper-lapse in turn opening and closing the lense.
There is a button in the display I also have to press to make sure I don’t have a constantly moving aperature :)
Better luck next time… and I’ll be sure to post it!
