2000 Photos In 3 Minutes by Petra Cross


2000 Photos In 3 Minutes

THURSDAY, MAY 17, 2012 AT 10:42PM
A friend sends you 2000 photos from her recent vacation. Are you are going to look at every single one? Let's be honest. Who wants to see other people's vacation photos? Nobody. Except, one thousand people wanted to see mine. What did I do to make them want to do so?
Congratulations! You just looked at 2000 photos in three minutes. Phew!
I came back from business trip to France last week and had twelve thousand photos on my hard drive. I was not going to edit them all and upload them into a giant album. But I also did not want to throw them away. I decided to make them interesting enough for my friends to want to look at them.

1.  Take lots of very similar photos 
In order to make your stop motion "flow", take tons of photos of the same thing. Use various techniques to make every image slightly different.
  • Move camera slightly between every shot.
  • Circle around subjects, or move the camera towards or away from the subject.
  • Move your subject between every shot. If the subject is a person, let them walk towards or away from the camera. Photograph people walking, dancing, jumping, etc.
If you travel, don't forget to photograph while you are in transport. Travel videos look better if you show the whole journey, including the airports and trains.
2. Optional: Reorder and crop
In an ideal world, you don't need to reorder the photos. Chronologic videos are great and show your journey accurately. But you will often find yourself in a situation when you need to swap some photos to make the story flow better.
Cropping might be needed if you want to create a true HD video which requires an aspect ratio of 16:9. However, if you are happy with the aspect ratio of the photos straight out of the camera (4:3 or 6:4), you can skip the cropping. YouTube will then pad your final video will black stripes on the left and right.
3. Save resized images with new file names
After you reorder the photos in your favorite photo editor (Lightroom, Picasa), you need to rename them so that they keep the new order after they are sorted by the file name. If you have photos from two or more cameras, synchronize them by time and then export (save) with new names containing sequence numbers. I used Adobe Lightroom to do this.
Lightroom allows me to automatically resize all images while saving them with new names. The above video was generated from photos that were 720 pixels wide, resulting in an HD quality. I did however keep the original 6:4 aspect ratio and you should see black stripes on the left and right of the frame.
This is what a renamed file sequence would look like. As you can see, it sorts nicely by file name.
4. Convert the photo sequence into a movie file 
Convert the photo sequence into a video file. I used an advanced function "Open Image Sequence" in QuickTime Player 7 do this (the license cost $30 but it's totally worth it). QuickTime will then ask you to select a frame rate. I picked 12 frames per second. After you choose the frame rate, you'll be presented with your stopmotion video. It will be silent, but it will already look cool. :) Congratulations! Pat yourself on a back, save it into a .mov file and move onto the next step!
5. Optional: Add magic
You can stop now and enjoy your silent movie or you can continue editing your video further.
The next thing you probably want to do is to add sound. Pick an upbeat song to match the fast frame rate of the video. I found this amazing song by We Like Monsters and it matched my video perfectly! After you select a song, you'll realize that the length of the song does not match the length of the movie. It seems like you'd need to trim one or the other. It's easier to shorten few long movie sequences in order to make the movie match the song length. I used iMovie for this job.
iMovie also lets you insert a sequence with animated globe which enhances travel videos with facts about where you traveled from and where you traveled to. Just click on the globe icon on the bottom right of your iMovie app.
6. Upload to YouTube
Upload your movie to YouTube with the highest possible resolution. It might take longer, but you wouldn't need to be frustrated with poor quality once you watch it on YouTube.
7. Tell them
Tell all your friends about your new video. While you're at it, you can also share this blog post with them to show them how you did it. Trust me, they'll be asking.
Make sure to check the whole "HOW TO" series to learn how to make other creative things.
And don't forget to send me links to your creations. I can't wait to see them!
Petra

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Email Marketing Statistics: Are you Using Email?

Image
July 30, 2013 2 minutes Is email marketing dead? I think not. Even though many are calling email marketing old fashioned and ineffective, it is still one of the top sources for lead nurturing and management. Consumers enjoy receiving emails. And  at least 91% of consumers check their email everyday . Which makes email the leading communication channel. Everything from the content within the body of the email to the length of your subject line to the ratio of pictures to text can effect the open and click through rates of your messages. Before you decrease your  email marketing  budget, we've highlighted 25 compelling statistics that will convince you to continue using email. The truth is email marketing is here to stay. Email Marketing Statistics: Are you Using Email? 1.  33% of email recipients open email based on subject line alone. (Source:  Convince and Convert )  Tweet this Stat! 2.  Emails that include social shar...
Read more

60 Steps for Your Content Writing Checklist3

Content Marketing by  Lesley Vos Lesley Vos is a content writer and blogger of  Bid4papers . Being an active social media user and current contributor to many websites, she is ready to share her writings and ideas with those people who need them. The first thing everyone finds out about me is that I love lists and checklists. Shopping lists, to-do lists, reading lists—I am always thrilled to make them. It’d be a shame if I didn’t have a detailed checklist for my #1 activity: content writing. For all my industry peers who face the daily challenge of keeping in mind all aspects of content creation, this list breaks down a content marketing process step-by-step. I bet you know all of them. But I bet my bottom dollar you forget some of them on an incredibly regular basis. And as we all know, repetition is the mother of skill, isn’t it? Idea Generation Stage Before implementation, idea generation comes. (As Yoda would phrase it...
Read more

11 Top-Notch Proofreading Tools for Content Marketers

 by  Mary Walton Content writing is often dismissed as merely filler for your website, but in fact, it is akin to an exact science. Get it right, and you’ll be able to bring in more readers and, with a little luck and persistence,  convert them  into customers. Get it wrong, and it’ll be noticed and held against you quicker than you’d think. If you want to get your content writing perfect, there are tools online that can help you . Here are eleven of the best tools online for polishing your content. 1.  Wordrake You have pages to fill, so you hammer at your keyboard and hope that what you’re writing makes sense. Often, though, when you’re racing to meet deadlines, you’ll write copy that really could use a second or even a third pass through. Wordrake helps you get that proofreading pass done quickly and easily. Install it in your text editor, and click the “rake” button to get started. It will go through the document and make sugge...
Read more