Hi all

I was wondering if someone might be able to help.

I'm having a problem creating a time-lapse clip in FCPX.

It's so simple, but I can't seem to get it to work! I'm adding around 350 jpegs to my timeline, creating a 'new compound clip' which lasts around 54minutes. If I scroll along the film at this point, the time-lapse is looking how I would like to it to look. But once I try to 'retime' the clip down to 15 seconds it will only show one clip over that time.

Would anyone be able to let me know what may be wrong?

Thanks,

Stuart

1- Unless you shot JPEG (assuming you couldn't shoot RAW), what are the image sizes of them? Any reason you're not using PNG?

2- What is the total duration you want the whole timeline to be when done?

There is a formula we're going to walk through for this.

According to the math, at 54 minutes, each photo is lasting about 6.48 seconds. That should simply not happen to start with.

If you want to show 15 seconds of video, at 30 frames per second, you get to have 450 total frames. With 350 photos, yes, there's going to be some jittery action there.

I'd actually use Motion for better results.

Hi Ben,

Thanks for getting back to me.

I just tried retiming a jumbled bunch of images, 10 in total taken from my phone, but the same thing is happening. As soon as I attempt to retime, the video will only show the first image of the timelapse throughout the videos duration.

Does this sound like a bug or a setting problem that I can't see?

Thanks,

Stu

Fixed! Something in my settings that had changed

Such as?

Having just done a couple of timelapse sequences for a planetarium show (fun!), I'd second the suggestion of using Motion. It has very good support for image sequences, and it's much simpler to bring in a set of stills at full resolution and reframe/keyframe moves there than in FCPX.

Sadly, we don't seem to have any equivalent to plugins like GBDeflicker for Motion/FCPX. The After Effects world is much more mature for timelapse processing, it seems.

I did a test for a timelapse project I had in mind a few weeks ago. I used QT Pro 7 to turn an image sequence into a .mov file and imported that to work with. QT 7 doesn't care on dimensions so it will be as large as your image size is. I then retimed and put a ken burns reframe on it to add additional movement (which the larger dimensions enabled me to do without losing definition). I've uploaded it here. It's a test and there's a jolt halfway through where I had to change the battery but it's made me keen to try other timelapse tests. I used a demo version of some software that I wasn't that impressed with so I think I'll just pick up a £20 timelapse controller from ebay instead. Interested to hear other people's techniques/tips with pre and post timelapse sequences.

I used 3 different interval times in the test too - 30 seconds, 10 and 5. I preferred 10 in this instance but it depends on the subject.