Speaker 1: Hey everyone, my name is Preston Kanuck, and in this video I'm going to show you how to media manage your timelapse footage. � The first thing you'll want to do when you are wanting to media manage is really prep your files so when you bring it into your computer you're going to be ready to go and quickly be able to filter through these shots. So really, this process starts while you're shooting. For me, when I'm shooting timelapses and have multiple timelapses on the same card, the key thing to do when you are shooting is between your timelapses is to take at least one or two frames and just block it out, whether you have your lens cap on the front and you fire a couple of block frames, or if you put your hand in front, kind of whatever works for you to create those markers is going to be super important when it comes to post-production. Once you've started to fill up your cards, the key also is that you don't format over cards that have content that you haven't offloaded yet. So what I normally will do with these cards is take the cards and tape them over with some gaff tape. So there's really no way that you're able to put these cards back into your camera without taking off that tape. So you physically have to do that action of pulling it off if you are going to format it. I used to take the cards and flip them over and put them in the card case and have that as the way to show myself that the cards are full. But by doing it that way and if you were to work with multiple people, sometimes you're going to run into issues. If you go this route and tape over your contacts, you're not going to run into that issue. The one thing that you're going to want to make sure you do as well with these cards is not to just tape over them. Find out some sort of system that works for you for keeping track of what's on each card. If you just have a bunch of cards and you don't know what's on them, it's going to take way more time in post-production to figure out what's on each of the cards. Now once you've got all your cards, you're going to want to start importing into your computer. And there are a few ways you can do this. You can either use the Finder directly or you can use standalone programs such as Shotput Pro or Red Giant's Offload. Now what's great about the standalone programs is that they do file verifications on each of these shots. So if there are any corrupt files, you can catch that right away. However, I like to just go through the Finder and use that as I find that the time calculations or estimations are the most accurate. What I do at this stage is get all the cards in front of me and start creating folders. So what I would do is just in the Home folder here, create a new Offloads folder and then do Offload 1, Offload 2, and so on. And then at this stage, I would basically select all of these files and drop it into the new Offloads folder, Offload 1, and paste it. Now while these files are offloading, kind of what I'm doing is scouring through to find those black frames. Once I find those black frames, I'm starting to then take those individual time lapses and drop them into their own folders. And as you can see, I've already done this here. Whatever naming convention that you want to go with, that's totally up to you. So you can see I've got a few time lapses imported here. Once the time lapses are imported and then organized, I then jump into Photo Mechanic. And there's two reasons that I use this program. The first is the previewing function that it has built in. I don't know what sort of voodoo they have working for them, but I use this to see what type of work needs to be done to each of the shots. Now before I do the preview, I also will go in and rename each of the files just to keep organized as my library of shots starts to grow. So I'll just navigate to one of these folders that I've imported here as another one. I'm just going to select all of the files, go File, Rename, Photos, and then determine what you want your naming convention to be. For me, obviously I'm going to go what I've named the folder structure here, Pure Sunset Static 30mm. And I want to make sure that I select the Sequence option here because I want this to be working as a time-lapse. If you kill the Sequence, it won't work for you when you bring it into these other programs. So I'll just hit Sequence here and it'll create a little bit of a code here. And then you want to make sure that when you hit this here that you've zeroed out and it starts at 1. Once you've created your naming convention, I'm just going to go ahead and hit Rename and you're going to see how quick it'll go and rename all your files. So that's done for us. Once I have those renamed, I can then jump in and see what needs to be done to these shots. So I double-clicked on just the first file in there and then once you have the first shot selected, you just hit the down arrow and you can already preview your time-lapse. So quickly previewing this, I see I'm going to want to smooth out the water and I actually noticed up here there's some birds that I want to get rid of as well. So once I'm kind of at this step, I'll take notes on each of the shots to see what needs to be done. I use Evernote, you can use a pad of paper, whatever you need to do to keep yourself organized. Once I've previewed the shots and made the notes, you can close out of Photo Mechanic and you're done with that program. Now once I had all my shots renamed through Photo Mechanic, at that stage, that's when I do my backup of my initial copy. So what I would do is navigate to the folder with the renamed files, copy that folder, and then drag it over to a second hard drive. So we would navigate to that same folder, so it would be a complete replica of the first hard drive, and then paste it into position. You can see I've already done it, it's already renamed and good to go. Once I've done that, I'll then move over to LRTimelapse and start working with the shots before prepping them for export. Once you've opened this program again, you're going to want to navigate to the shots. So go to the first one, which was Pier 5, and select that folder. It's going to quickly import the shot for you. And there's two different ways you can do this here. If you go to the visual workflow, what it's going to allow you to do is preview your changes as you're making them along the way. So when you give your corrections in Lightroom, you can come back to LRTimelapse and see what those corrections look like, and you can also see if you're doing any deflickering, you can see how well it's deflickered with these visual previews. Now it does take a little bit longer when you do use that, but it allows you to kind of save some time if you were to want to export directly from LRTimelapse, or if you needed to make any other fine adjustments before moving into other programs for exporting. I use After Effects, but I mean, it depends on your workflow, what you prefer. So for this specific one, we're just going to go and hit the basic workflow because we're not going to need to do any of that visual previews for this shot. We just want to run it through LRTimelapse to do a light deflickering and the post-processing in Lightroom as well. So once this is loaded, I'll go ahead and you hit Keyframe Wizard, and at that point you determine how many keyframes that you want to have for your shot. For this specific shot, I'm only going to want to have two keyframes, one at the start and one at the end. I'd let this shot go in aperture priority, but I didn't do the manual stepping, so I don't need to create multiple keyframes to smooth out those shots. So the file is just finishing up loading here. I'm going to hit the Keyframe Wizard, and like I said, I want to only have two keyframes. Once you have these two keyframes that show up, you just hit Save, and it'll go through and save the metadata for those shots. Once I've imported the clips into here, I'll then open up Lightroom and then drag this button over onto the Lightroom Import dialog. And I'm sure there's a few different ways you can go about importing these clips in. This is kind of just what I've found to work. I'll just hit Add to Collection, take this folder here, drag it down to the Lightroom application, back up here, and drop it in. And then it's going to import this timelapse into Lightroom for me. Once it's imported into Lightroom, you're then going to want to go down to the Filters option and go to the Rated filter. And what it's doing here is basically going to pull out those two keyframes, or those two shots that had the keyframes attached to them, and allow you to edit those photos. So I'll just start going into developing, or creating the look for these shots. And again, this is totally personal preference how you want your shots to look. I'm going to just quickly go through this here. All right, and something like that's where I'll leave this shot, and I'll just copy these settings and paste them to the last shot to see if I'm happy with that. If not, you can do tweaks as needed. I'll maybe want to reduce the contrast just a little bit here, bring up some of those blocks. Something like that looks fine to me. It's not the best shot in the world, but you'll get the idea. Once you've done the corrections to it, you'll then want to just save the metadata for these shots. Once you've done that, you'll want to go back to LR Timelapse and hit Reload, which is basically going to reload the metadata for those two shots you just corrected. Once you've done that, you're then going to want to hit Auto Transition, which is going to transition between your keyframes. So say you've got multiple keyframes corrected, or created looks for multiple keyframes, this will kind of smooth its way, or blend between each keyframe. And then from there, you're going to want to hit De-Flicker, if you need to de-flicker your timelapses. I de-flicker virtually every single timelapse, even if it's just a slight flicker in it. I find that it does a great job at just making sure it's completely smooth all the way through. Here you can fine-tune where you want this to go. I'll just bump it up a little bit. You'll figure out kind of what works best for you, and you can kind of go with that. I'm going to hit Apply, and it's going to apply that de-flickering. And then from there, you just hit Save, which is going to save the metadata for those files. Once I've done this, I then jump into After Effects. Now I know a lot of people will do exports directly from LRTimelapse. For me, I find the downfall is that I can't do multiple exports at the same time. And because I like to do both a low-resolution and a high-resolution export, and I want to do multiple shots at the same time, kind of After Effects is my go-to program. I can set those shots to export before I go to bed, wake up, and all the shots are exported for me. So from here, I'm just going to close down this program, and then open up After Effects. Once you're inside After Effects, I want to just create a project file to keep all my timelapses organized. So I'll just navigate to the folder where I have my project files, tutorials, videos, project files. I'll name this Media Management Tutorial. And then at this stage, I'll import my timelapses into After Effects. So I'll just go and navigate to the folder where we created the XMPs for all those files. So you'll see when you go through this whole process, what's happening is because these are RAW files, all these changes you're making to those images are saved in the sidecar files or the XMP files. You want to select the first shot in your sequence. Now sometimes if you don't have the Camera RAW Sequence dialog selected, it'll just import that first shot. By default, this is checked, so you shouldn't have a problem. However, at some point, if you would have unchecked that, you'll want to go hit the Options button and then make sure that's selected. So I'll just hit Open. And then the Camera RAW dialog will come up and it'll be bringing in your settings you selected for your shots. You don't have to touch this. I just OK past this screen. And then from here, you're going to want to take this timelapse that is imported as a sequence and drag it down to your composition icon, which is going to create a composition with the same settings as that shot. So if you'll see the frame size for this one, because I'm shooting with the D810, it's pretty large. The composition settings is 7000 pixels by 5000 pixels. At this stage, I want to go and make those changes that I had noted in when I did the preview inside of Photo Mechanic, which is removing the birds and then smoothing out the water. There are multiple tutorials online showing you how to remove birds. You can do it either manually where you clone out every single bird or you can do this simple trick which will get rid of them as well. So just duplicate this layer, just hit Command D, and then you're going to want to bump this top layer over one frame, which is just dragging this over. Once you've dragged the start of the clip to here, you then click on this part of the clip and drag it back. And from here in the mode, you're going to want to change that to lighten. So when you scroll in here or scrub in here, you're going to see what happens. So you'll see right here, there's a bird. Once this loads, you're going to see the bird go away. Now once the birds are removed, I want to go and smooth out that water. So I'll just pre-compose these two layers together and call it just main comp. And then from here, I'm going to want to just duplicate this a few times. And there's a few different approaches to smooth out this water. I'm just going to do this one now because I know I only want a few layers here. I just want to smooth it out just a little bit. And then I'm going to go and hit T, which is the opacity, and then dial back the opacity for each layer. I've done a previous tutorial that kind of walks you through each of the different methods for smoothing it out. So if you want to find out more, feel free to check out those tutorials. And there we are. Once you have that water smoothed out, you'll want to then just pre-compose the water layer. So just select them all, go pre-compose, and I'll just do water composite. You want to have something that is a little better descriptors for your names, but for this I'm just obviously doing this real quick. And then from there, I'm going to want to take your main comp, drag it underneath of the water composite, and then select the water composite layer, and then chop that out of the shot. So what this is doing is just taking that water composite on top of the main comp, but leaving the clouds to be more natural. Now once you've created that specific look and feel for your shot, the next thing you'll want to do is move into your batch exports. And with these exports, I'll always do the full resolution export as well as a 1080p version export as well. The reason I do this is just to have a lower resolution file to work with in my edits. When I go to that final export, I will replace it with the high resolution version, it's just by doing this, my whole workflow is quite a bit faster. Now to create that low resolution file, I'm going to just quickly organize this here before I do that. You'll want to make sure if you're working with multiple time lapses that you do keep yourself much more organized than I am in this tutorial, but I mean you get the idea. So I'll go to create that 1080p sequence, I'll go composition, new composition, rename this Pure 5 Sunset Static 30mm 1080p. You want to make sure that it's in the frame size you want and the duration of that given clip. Good to go. And then from here I'll drag in the full resolution version down, I'll put this folder or this file in this folder as well to keep with that one time lapse, and then from here I'm going to just scale down the 1080p or the full resolution version to fit the 1080p sequence. That's close enough. Again this is a proxy, I'm going to replace this in the final edit anyways, but this is just kind of that working proxy file. From here I'm going to go composition, add to render queue, and then for me with the output module I always work in Apple ProRes 422. If you're a Windows-based computer you'll probably change to different formats. For me on a Mac this is my go-to, go 422, hit OK. And then here, say you didn't want to create the extra composition, you can actually take your full resolution export and you can resize it through this. Again I prefer to use a unique composition to do the 1080p export, you'll choose whatever works best for you. So we'll go ahead, hit OK, and then choose where I want to put these shots. And what I generally like to do is, if you look at these folders here, here's where all the raw time lapse files are located. I like to actually send those exports to a separate folder so I keep all my exports in one place. Because this is the 1080p version I'm going to navigate to that 1080p folder, hit save, and I'm going to go back to my original full resolution export and do the same thing. Composition, add to render queue, and it's going to start creating those batch exports. It's not going to export each one individually, it's going to do all of them kind of at once. Once you've added them all to your render queue, that's when I would export once they're all kind of prepped and ready to go. Again I'm going to go to output module and change that to 422, hit OK. And then create the destination for the second one, which is the full resolution export, hit save. And then for this tutorial I'm only going to export two, normally I'd have much more time lapses to export, you get the idea though. Then I would hit render, and it would go through the night and export those clips for me. Now once those clips are exported, what I would do is go back to the original folder from this time lapse, and color code to know that this specific time lapse has been exported. So for this I'll just color code it red, you can color code it whatever color you want, but this just reminds me that this time lapse has been exported. That's pretty much it for my media management process, as you can see I create two copies of everything, and then for my time lapse exports, I'll normally keep three copies. I normally would keep these on a server so I could access at any time to see what export files I have. So that's pretty much it when it comes to my media management for time lapse footage. If you have any questions or concerns or ways to make that workflow more efficient, just let me know. Thanks for watching.