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iMovie Time lapse
PLEASE NOTE (UPDATE FEB 2/2015)
– I’M EDITING THIS PAGE AS I LEARN THE iMOVIE SW
Mac’s are easy, eh?
I wanted to import a bunch of snow photos into something to make a time lapse movie and the google gnomes suggested iMovie – so I went to our Mac – macstake?
It appears that iMovie 10.x has made this more difficult than previous versions of iMovie… fortunately there was a thread on https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6295903?tstart=0 from DFKOTZ that helped me figure it out… step by step!
I followed the tips in this thread, today, and managed to make a time-lapse movie from over 3,000 photos at 0.1 second per frame. I’m using iMovie 10.0.9.
Useful things to know:
- There is only 16:9 resolution in version 10. (this is smart for apple to do in the progress realm, but not so great for those of us with older tech!)
- Press the forward slash “/” button to play a frame that is selected in the timeline
I think it went like this:
- Import the photos into iMovie as a new event.
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- Click Down Arrow at top of iMovie Window
- Select folder with desired media (in my case, time lapse photos)
- Go to top of window where it says “Import to” and select ‘New Event’
- Select Import Selected
- Your view should now be of the clips (photos) in that event.
- Ensure the View… Sort Clips By… shows Date so the clips are ordered in time sequence.
- Create a New Movie using the No Theme style, within that same event.
- In the Clips pane, Select All (cmd-A) to select all the clips.
- Add To Movie (press the “E” key).
- Sometimes you see what appears to be image ‘transitions’; however, when select the transitions tab, none are active… hmmmmm.
- If this happens to you click the CROP button and see if Ken Burns is selected. If it is, deselect it, and, voila – then the moving zoom will be removed!
- Ken Burns Effect Tutorial: https://onlineacademiccommunity.uvic.ca/techfairy/2015/02/13/imovie-10-tutorial-5-the-ken-burns-effect/
- If this happens to you click the CROP button and see if Ken Burns is selected. If it is, deselect it, and, voila – then the moving zoom will be removed!
- Sometimes you see what appears to be image ‘transitions’; however, when select the transitions tab, none are active… hmmmmm.
- Click one of the clips in the Timeline pane, then Select All (cmd-A) to select all the clips in the timeline.
- Choose Windows… Movie Properties (cmd-J) and click Settings in the Preview pane.
- In Photo Placement choose Fit.
- If you don’t see Photo Placement click on the crop icon (a rectangle with extended sides).
- Click the information icon (an “i” with a circle around it).
- You should see a Duration box; erase what is in that box and type 0.1 (for a tenth of a second) or whatever duration you want each photo to consume in your video.
- In Photo Placement choose Fit.
- Now you have the core of a time-lapse movie!
- Add titles if you want.
- If you want to add a transition, like a fade to black after the last clip, or a fade between clips, you’ll need to select the neighboring clip(s) and extend their duration longer than 0.5 seconds (the default duration of a transition). After the transition is inserted you can fiddle the duration of the neighboring clip(s) to get the effect you want.
- See my timelapse video on SmugMug.
- These photos were captured with a Nikon D300 camera on a tripod and set to Interval mode with a 20s interval. I used iMovie to present them at 0.1s each (200x real time), to add titles, and to add a pause and fade-to-black at the end of each day’s photo sequence.
