Stitching a Time-Lapse Together

Time-lapse Workflow
Welcome to Final Cut Pro X in under 5 minutes. I’m Steve from rippletraining.com. Many of you shoot time-lapse with your DSLR’s, GoPro cameras and iDevices. Whatever camera you’re using to capture your images, I’m going to show you how work with them in Final Cut Pro X.
During the monsoon season here in Arizona, we get late-afternoon thunderheads that make great time-lapse subjects. Here in the Browser, I’ve imported sequentially numbered photos taken from my DSLR. If you press and hold the down arrow key you can get a preview of what the time-lapse will look like before stringing out the photos in the timeline.
Next I’ll create a project, but before I do so, I’ll press Option-Command-2 to switch the Browser to List View. Scrolling over to the Frame Size metadata column, we can see the frame size for each image is 2880×1920 – basically these are 3K images.
One of the main advantages of shooting photos instead of video for time-lapse work, is that the resolution is 2 to 6 times greater than standard HD video, which as you’ll see, gives you some creative options.
Press Command-N to create a new Project and name it. Click the “Use Custom Settings” button then the Custom button. From the Format pop up choose > Custom. Enter the resolution of your photos – in this case 2880×1920. You’ll also want to choose a frame rate. I’ll choose 30p.
Back in the Browser, select all the photos you want to include in your time-lapse movie. As you can see from the clip names, they are numbered sequentially which is important, because Final Cut Pro will string them out in the timeline in the order they’re numbered.
Press E to add the photos to the timeline. The first thing you’ll notice when playing back is that the image duration is too long. Selecting a photo and pressing control-d reveals its duration to be 10 seconds. Unfortunately, there is no way to tell Final Cut to override this 10 second default before editing the clips into the timeline, so you’ll need to do it afterwards.
Press command-A to select all the clips, then press control-d to enter a new duration. I’ll enter 1 because I want each photo in the sequence to play for 1 frame – then I’ll press Return. Now all my clips are bunched up at the left side of the timeline. I’ll press Shift-Z to fit the clips to the window and play back….That’s more like it.
Next, I want to place this 3K project into an HD project in order to change the framing and output a 1080p movie. We can do this by creating a compound clip, then changing the project settings.
Press Command-A to select the images, then press Option-G. Enter a name for your compound clip and press return. The single-frame images are now replaced by a single compound clip in the Timeline.
Bring up the Project Properties by pressing Command-J and click the Modify Settings button. Choose 1080p HD from the format popup and click OK. The 3K compound clip has been fit to the newly created 1080p project as evidenced by the pillar boxing at the left and right side of the frame.
In the Spatial Conform section of the inspector, you can either fill the frame or you can choose none which gives you the option to reframe and/or scale the image within the 1080 frame size.
When you’re ready to output, just choose a 1080p share option or post to your favorite sharing site.