Larkspur Ferry Time Lapse Video

Time Lapse Ferry Video
Time Lapse Ferry Video

This is a quick little time lapse video of the Larkspur ferry ride from Larkspur to San Francisco. It’s also an experiment in creating a time lapse using digital photos instead of a video camera. I captured each of the images using my Canon Powershot G3. I simply took photos every 20-30 seconds.

The next step was to import the photos into the computer and place them in their own folder. In addition, I created another empty folder for holding scaled down versions. With Photoshop, I used the Automate Batch functionality to scale the photos down to DV size (720×480). The resulting scaled images are placed in the empty folder. It’s important that they are in their own folder for the next step.

Then I created a Premiere project and imported the folder of scaled images. I did this by selecting File->Import and then selecting the first image filename. Before clicking Open, I clicked the Numbered Stills checkbox. This will import all of the images as a single video rather than individual images.

From there I was able to place the video, create the titles, and generate the final video.

NOTE: I have done plenty of video and still photo time lapses. This was specifically a test using digital photos, manual capturing, and moving while capturing. So, the results are not as pretty as still versions. But it has given me some ideas. Oh, and it’s a bit fast when played. Try manual stepping through at your own pace (keyboard with Quicktime works great for this).

Enjoy!


One response

  1. jim Avatar

    Cool! How many frames were involved? Did all this fit on one 512M card?
    I like the photoshop batch mode for its thumbnail creation. I hadn’t thought of trying to construct an animation from it, though.

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