I'm always on the lookout for great tutorial sites and School of Motion is definitely one of them.
Founded by Joey Korenman, School of Motion offers bootcamps in animation and character animation for a fee, as well as loads of free tutorials for aspiring motion graphics artists. Membership is free, but you don't get bombarded with a mountain of email spam.
Genevieve Landryprovides a quick review by of color correction tools included with Adobe After Effects. Make sure to check out the process to create vignettes & blurs and the use of Adjustment Layers to afford greater control.
Here's a quick preview of new features to be included in the next release of After Effects. New and improved Warp Stabilizer, a new refine edge tool to simplify rotoscoping, and tight integration with Maxon Cinema 4D.
Here's a tutorial by Chris Meyer of the ProVideo Coalition to walk you through the steps to use After Effects to create titles for Premiere Pro projects.
After Effects offers a number of text animation presets to offer looks that can't be created in Premiere Pro. And since the Premiere Pro project is dynamically linked to the After Effects composition, titles can be tweaked and edited after they're integrated into a Premiere Pro project. The motion graphic design work of Chris and Trish Meyer has appeared on major TV networks and Hollywood films. They're also gifted teachers and the authors of a number of books on Adobe After Effects. Check out their Amazon.com page.
A simple Google search will yield oodles of DSLR time lapse examples.
However, I didn't find much regarding post-processing. How do you
process that sequence of stills to get the best results? Working with the Nikon D7000 and Adobe After Effects, here's what I found.
When setting the camera the most important thing to remember is to set the exposure and focus manually. If either of these settings varies from frame to frame it can ruin the effect. The camera was set to make an exposure every 30 seconds over a four hour period.
Also for this test I shot the stills at the camera's lowest resolution - JPEG Basic 2464 x 1632. Why so low? Because these stills are destined to be incorporated into a 720p composition. Even at that low image setting, the pictures will need to be scaled down to about 27% of their original size to approximate the 720p frame.
A handy feature on the D7000 is its built-in Interval Timer. Here's a video which demos that tool:
Post-Processing
I use After Effects to convert the sequence of time-lapse stills to video. You can use Premiere Pro although I found that version CS4 struggled to render the sequence. After Effects worked much more smoothly.
In After Effects, import the stills making sure to check "Jpeg Sequence". The sequence of stills will be treated as a single clip in the After Effects timeline.
After placing the clip in a 720p composition here are the results with no adjustments applied:
That looks OK and comparable to many time lapse videos I've seen. But it runs rather fast and the animation seems like it could be smoother.
I decided to double the time of the clip by applying Time Stretch to the clip - Layer>Time>Time Stretch - 200%. Since Time Stretch is set to 200%, the program is simply doubling each frame. Yuk.
To smooth the animation I applied Frame Blending
- a powerful tool to correct that problem. Here are the results:
Not bad but notice the image distortion that occurs in the landscape as the clouds pass overhead. The following still frames are zoomed in to show the problem.
Distorted
Correct
Well that's no good.
After some additional research and testing I learned that After Effects offers two kinds of Frame Blending - Frame Mix & Pixel Motion. Adobe claims Pixel Motion to be the superior tool and I've found that the program defaults to that setting when Frame Blending is applied. But for this clip, Frame Mix provides better results. To change that setting - Layer > Frame Blending >
Frame Mix
Pretty smooth.
Finally here's an example by landscape photographer, Terje Sorgjerd which aptly demonstrates some of the possibilities of time lapse.
Note too that some of the shots include camera movement. One popular rig to achieve this effect is the Stage Zero Dolly from Dynamic Perception Here's a demo that shows how the system works:
After Effects is an amazing program. That's not particularly newsworthy.
But when using third party plug ins, it's not uncommon for a "demo" version watermark to reappear - even after you've paid your money and activated the plugin. In the past two weeks, I've experience this problem with Magic Bullet Looks and Zaxwerks 3D Invigorator Classic.
I'm not sure if this is a Windows issue or an After Effects issue or a plugin issue and I don't really care. Broken software is a real momentum-buster when you're trying to get something done. And when aren't we?
Anyway, here's a simple fix to try before spending hours attempting other remedies.
The problem can be found in the After Effects preference file. You can force the application to rebuild it by pressing and holding down Cmd-Opt-Shift (mac)/ Ctrl-Alt-Shift(win) immediately after you've clicked the AE icon.
I've found this solution is quick and often corrects the watermark problem.
If this doesn't help don't hesitate to involve the software support staff. I've worked with the folks at Magic Bullet Looks and Zaxwerks and both were friendly and responsive.
