Vimeo Video School

Vimeo Video School provides bite-sized spoonfuls on video-making topics, organized in categories. Tutorials come from the staff and members of Vimeo; the discussions of Timelapse are good and come from familiar sources.

Nick Campbell of GreyScale Gorilla is featured for an initial After Effects tutorial.

GSG Cast: Intro to After Effects from Nick Campbell on Vimeo.

Frame Restorer script uses Timewarp

The week of Paul Tuersley at AE Scripts (one new script a day) begins now with the new After Effects script: pt_FrameRestorer:

This script can quickly restore damaged or missing frames. Use layer markers to specify which frames to restore, or get the script to search for color bars and restore any missing frames. The script uses the Timewarp effect to create new in between frames.

Time-lapse and dynamic pans

Drew Geraci aka TheVoder.com posted Creating Dynamic Pans in your Timelapse (below via Lester Banks), which shows how to:

• batch process your images to save system resources
• create a dynamic link between Premiere and After Effects
• create a camera and null object within After Effects to apply to your time-lapse
• create a pan (or zoom) in your time-lapse

See also Creating Timelapse Movies in After Effects, with an example by Ross Chang and a similar tutorial from Rich Harrington. [update: targeted more to Photoshop users is QuickHit #8: Creating Time-Lapse Movies in AE (Pt. 1) from Colortrails.]

By the way, After Effects has a filter called Color Stabilizer to fix flicker in time-lapse (see also the "auto effects"). Granite Bay has a nice guide on causes and cures to fix it, and a video on using their AE plug-in GBDeflicker. There's also GenArts Tinder DeFlicker which has about six ways to remove flicker to do multiple passes, but there's no CS5 version yet.

Here's Drew Geraci's tutorial:

Creating Dynamic Pans in your Timelapse from Andrew Geraci on Vimeo.

Update: see also Vimeo Video School's section on time-lapse and Combining Multiple DSLR Exposures in AE.

Still-to-Still Morphs with RE:Flex

RE:Vision Effects posted a tutorial on using RE:Flex to do Still-to-Still Morphs (below).

Three somewhat similar tutorials were noted last month in More slow motion from pictures using Pixel Motion.

The making of 'Something Left, Something Taken'

For those procrastinating looking at the making of “Something Left, Something Taken” via Red Giant Software, Todd Kopriva says "This 31-minute video is a masterpiece of education and inspiration." Read his other comments at After Effects region of interest.


RGTV Episode 47: Tiny Inventions from Red Giant Software on Vimeo.

Time-stretching and time-remapping

AE Facebook noted the After Help resource pages on Time-stretching and time-remapping; see also the Help pages on Timewarp and other Time effects. Andrew Kramer's 29. Speed Variation pretty much covers it in video.

You can also find a few extras from some old reliables: Freeze Frame with Time Remapping, a video by Aharon Rabinowitz; Animate Time, a PDF by Mark Christiansen; and Change of Pace, a PDF by Chris & Trish Meyer.

There's not much new except a few techniques (one using RE:Vision Twixtor plug-in) mentioned in recent posts Motion estimated morphing time-remapping on stills and Adding motion blur to video or 3D renders, and a slight tangent with Keying, Time Remapping, & Stills in Premiere CS5.

After Effects expressions: Time, Layer Numbers, Speed, and Velocity

Chris and Trish Meyer posted the 6th of the 12-part series Deeper Modes of Expression, based on an extra in their book Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects. The 6th installment is Deeper Modes of Expression, Part 6: Managing Time, Layer Numbers, Speed, and Velocity:

"By default, expressions assume you are interested in values at the current time. If you need to know the current time, just use the keyword time in an expression, and After Effects will return the current time in seconds (not frames, as we discussed in the previous section).

However, expressions allow you to access values at different points in time. They also let you find out what time keyframes and markers are located at so you can have animations change as they approach or cross one of these keys, as well as reference what other layers are doing. In this installment, we’ll explore a couple of ways to exploit time. ...including having one layer echo the movements of another with delay."

Creating Timelapse Movies in After Effects

If you liked Running on Empty by Ross Ching (a timelapse of scenes of empty LA freeways) or the timescapes by Tom Lowe, you may want a peek at Creating Timelapse Movies in After Effects by Richard Harrington, who shows you the basics in AE of how to use time-lapse photographs to create pan & scan video clips.

Update: see also later posts, Time-lapse and dynamic pans, Time-lapse: Real is the New Virtual, and Color Stabilizer, GBDeflicker, or Tinderbox T_Deflicker

Keying, Time Remapping, & Stills in Premiere CS5

The latest from Jason Levine is embedded below.

Note: the Time Warp effect from CS3 and CS4 was removed from Premiere CS5, but there's always Pixel Motion and Time Warp in After Effects if you need better results.


DSLR Workflow in Premiere Pro CS5 - Keying, Time Remapping & Stills from Jason Levine on Vimeo.

Update: Karl Soule added another on DSLR,

Motion estimated morphing time-remapping on stills

Lester Banks posted a cool technique from "The Great Zimm" on Vimeo. Untested here, it uses Pixel Motion on a short still sequence in After Effects, which yields some easy motion-estimated morphing time-remapping that was pretty smooth in the later examples that had very little motion. If things don't work the way you want, you may find more control using the Timewarp filter (Chris Meyer says you can check out additional details on this filter in The Foundry's Kronos documentation).

This recalls a recent method shown by Eran Stern that created a video with extreme slow motion using just a few still frames with Twixtor; see Extreme slow motion using still frames in AE. [update: Later in RE:Flex Still-to-Still Morphs in AE, Lori Freitag covers the basics of morphing between still images within After Effects using the RE:Flex Morph plug-in.]

pixel motion tutorial after effects from The Great Zimm on Vimeo.

Update: This technique might also be applied to smooth over jump cuts.

As noted in Morph to smooth a jump cut, Wes Plate uses RE:Flex (Motion Morph) to do this. Seamless smoothing over jump cuts can be quite complicated and may require animating and tracking masks of facial features (eyes as they blink, mouth, dimples, brow wrinkles, nostrils) as well as hair & clothing for the better part of a second on each side of an edit to guide the morph. There's actually a transition for this in Avid, Illusion FX> Fluid Morph, can work in some cases.

Update Oct 18, 2010: see More slow motion from pictures using Pixel Motion.

Extreme slow motion using still frames in AE

In a new After Effects tutorial, Slow Motion Stills, Eran Stern shows you an ingenious technique to create a video with extreme slow motion using just a few still frames (eek) with Twixtor Pro from RE:Vision Effects.

You should be able to do the same thing with built-in tools in After Effects, although in some cases Twixtor's Object Separation and Spline Guidance controls may be missed.

Update Oct 18, 2010: In RE:Flex Still-to-Still Morphs in AE, Lori Freitag covers the basics of morphing between still images within After Effects using the RE:Flex Morph plug-in.

BBC 'Life': 2-year timelapse, 96 layers in After Effects

The 'Plants' episode from the BBC nature series, Life (with David Attenborough), features a making-of segment that shows a 2-year timelapse of plant growth that is composited in After Effects (via @tomguilmette). Here's that segment and a preview that discusses how other state-of-the-art techniques help capture extraordinary images:




Life - A preview of the series. from Documentally on Vimeo.

Yenaphe's free timelapse footage

In addition to unique posts on his blog, Sébastien Périer is adding a section for free Scripts & Stock Footage, and recently posted 2 free HD clips (clouds and melting ice) in a variety of formats.

Video Sampling Workflow with After Effects Scripting

Jaymis on Create Digital Motion posted a video sampling workflow that works with After Effects scripting:

"Like to cut up and sample video? Sick of all that time-consuming scrubbing, slicing and rearranging in Vegas or Premiere? Well I’ve figured out a workflow using a collection of After Effects scripts which turns lots of tedious editing into a very quick process to output a series of video clips for your VJing pleasure."

Color Stabilizer, GBDeflicker, or Tinderbox T_Deflicker

(May 2015) this article was updated on Pro Video Coalition as Flicker removal in Creative Cloud and beyond.

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DV Guru reported on a new AE/Premiere-compatible Windows filter, GBDeflicker, to reduce flicker in time-lapse footage (see video below). Besides the free beta, Granite Bay, makers of the filter, also have a nice guide on what causes flicker in time-lapse as well as cures to fix it.

AE Pro [RIP] already has a filter called Color Stabilizer to fix this sort of problem. I'm not sure how results compare, or if other filters like Tinderbox DeFlicker [now Sapphire] used in NBC's 'My Name is Earl' are even better.