Little Trip To China (Time Lapse)

I had a trip to Guangzhou, China in this semester during Chinese new year, and I made a time lapse of the trip, called Little Trip To China, I recorded the trip from Kuala Lumpur airport all the way to China. It was a great trip, and I'm really glad that I had my camera with me and captured around 6000 images to combine them into a time lapse video, it is a travel log, hope you like it.

Research on Time-lapse Photography
Time-lapse photography is a technique whereby the frequency at which film frames are captured is much lower than that used to view the sequence.
When played at the normal speed, time appears to be moving faster and thus lapsing. The result is an apparent 30-times increase.
Process that would normally appear subtle to the human eye, e.g. the motion of the sun and stars in the sky, become very pronounced. Time lapse is the extreme version of the cinematography technique of under cranking, and can be confused with stop motion.
(Resource from Wikipedia)



I watched some of time-lapse video on Youtube, and got some inspirations from the videos I watched. such as this one, very typical. This video is called The Longest Way, a time-lapse of how his hair and beard grew during a ling trip in China. A very creative idea.

So then I decided to do a travel log with my time-lapse assignment.









After the trip, I got back to Malaysia with these more-than 6000 images, and tried to combine them into a video; at the beginning, I chose to use Premiere Adobe to combine the images into a time-lapse video, but I actually spent 1 week to combine the images in Premiere software, and I couldn't render everything in the end, so I chose to give up and try to find some other ways to make this video.

So I went on Youtube to find some Time-lapse tutorial videos and have a look at how other people make their time-lapse video; then I found this tutorial video. This guys used Light Room software to combine the images into a time-lapse video, then I gave a try, downloaded and installed Light Room on my PC, and successfully made my time-lapse video.

Light Room isn't a video editing program, it is an image editor, so after I rendered all the images into time-lapse video, I used Windows Live Movie Maker to add music and effect.

The reason why Premiere worked very slow on making time-lapse video is because the images' size are too big, and too many.

When I installed Light Room in my PC, I didn't start working with all the images I have first, I first started experimenting with the quarter of the images that I have, but at the first experiment, I didn't know that I had to install a template in Light Room program to make the frames move faster than the program gave to the video itself, so the first experiment looked like this in the video on the right side, and didn't really look like a time-lapse video, because the  frequency is really low.

So I downloaded the template as the tutorial video told, and installed the template in the Light Room program, so it looked like this. It is much faster than the last video.

After the experiment, I started working on all of the images and rendered all into a time lapse video without any music.










The video is done, so it's time to choose music and edit the video, I watched the video many times to choose right music for this time-lapse video, then I think Electro Swing type of music for the video, because electro swing music's got fast and happy beat, exactly in the theme that the video is. The video shows a really fast movement of different places and the journey is as fast as the time lapsed. So I picked 1 song called The Trumpet, Electro Swing genre. and added the titles and blog address in the beginning and the end of the video.

So this is one of my photography assignments in this semester, Time lapse; I managed to practice and learn the skills of making time-lapse, and met a lot of problems in the process, but I tried to manage with all the problems that I had. This is my first time working on time-lapse project, I know the video isn't the best, but I would try to make it better and better in the future.
Hope you like this travel log, Little Trip To China.