Tournai : the picturesque medieval bridge across the Escaut river

Time lapse clips are made of hundreds of still images shot every two or three seconds during a period of at least ten minutes, depending on the wanted length of the clip and the interval of seconds itself. Traffic passing by, clouds bubbling up, sunsets,... will offer the motion that brings life to the landscape as well as emotional and mesmerising impact. Undesired objects might often interfere in this creative proccess. Whether you are focusing a scenery in the city or in the nature, flying birds or insects will render small black dots which can ruin the experience visually. This unpredictible issue might sometimes affect a bench of images, not only one here or an other over there. When so many are concerned, retouching frame by frame will then make the workflow painfull. Remember also : from a photographic point a view, everything is set up manually. So, most of the time the light may change dramatically in short intervalls. Again specific adjusments in postproduction will be achieved in order to decrease the gaps of luminance, or even the change of contrast or color tone. Such variations are softened by the natural perception of your eyes and the interpretation by the brain. However the camera render them in a more brutal way, this is why in-depth editing, with the right tools, will apply. For the same reason, if a sequence is shot with a telelens, or from a bridge, imperceptible shaky moves will be noticable when replaying the clip. The cleaning part of time lapse making process is awaited to raise the value of the work, and to make the final video simply nicer to watch.

High quality time lapse clips are usually made with still images out of a DSLR (digital single lens reflex) camera with 3:2 aspect ratio. Ratio refers to the proportion of the length to the height of the image. Now, standard videos use slightly different ratio. Full HD videos (1920x1080 pixels) or 4K-UHD (3840x2160 pixels) video follow the 16:9 aspect ratio. In order to match this standard widescreen ratio, cropping will be required when importing DSLR images in the timeline. As a consequence, the ready to use uhd and fhd time lapse clips shown on this website have been cropped top and bottom, for most of the time, evenly. This is where 5K+ size becomes interesting. Depending on the sensor of the camera used, the ultimate format size rises up to 5,1 or 5,6 K : respectively 5184x3456 or 5616x3744 pixels. That means : way bigger images. And the more pixels you have, the more realistic, the sharper the videos are looking. Nowadays full HD shows its age and 4K becomes the new standard. Clearly the shift to 4K timelines in on progress. Higher 5K resolution will deeply expand creative editing capacities, such as: reframing in total flexibility, cropping down to HD with details preserved, zooming in to individual sections of an image... No matter what sort of project you start with, the higher resolution will offer best results to enjoy.