Time-lapse trouble shooting

[madisonofriel]

Ok so over the weekend I was staying at my grandparents home, and they live on a cliff overlooking the valley. Well every morning around 5am the fog rolls in over the valley and the sunrise comes over the mountains. It is the most gorgeous thing I've ever seen. So I decided to do my first time-lapse, seeing as my new camera has a function for this. So I got up at 5am and started shooting. I set my camera for every 12 seconds (Don't know if this is right or not) and hoped for the best. Well my plan was to get the fog disappearing but unfortunately my battery died. Anyway I took almost 700 shots and now need to make them into a "movie". I have seen several youtube tutorials on this but cannot seem to get it to work. I have Quick time pro on a windows computer, and so far I get them all into a sequence but it comes out... choppy... not smooth. What am I doing wrong?
So basically how many frames per second is best for 658 photos? Right now when I play it back it only shows like 47 different frames.
Or if you could give me a step by step process that would be fantastic.
THANK YOU!

 

[astroNikon]

The simpliest way I've done this is using Windows MovieMaker
It's somewhat intuitive after you fiddle around with it for a bit.

You'll want to make all the image corrections before this final step. So any Whitebalnce, ISO corrections, etc is all done before this as the software is only good at making timelapse things.
I found out that I had to make smaller sized images from my first attempt. But you'll figure out how you want it. You can vary the time between each shot, etc.

When I did a TL of a storm rolling in that had a tornado still rolling horizontally I think I used 0.25second duration.

 

[astroNikon]

Also with something so long you may want to try and add music to it. But look for "free" music as anything downloaded etc you may have copyright issues.

FYI, I'm only a newbie at timelapse but it certainly can be fun and enjoyable to watch the end product.

 

[madisonofriel]

The simpliest way I've done this is using Windows MovieMaker
It's somewhat intuitive after you fiddle around with it for a bit.

You'll want to make all the image corrections before this final step. So any Whitebalnce, ISO corrections, etc is all done before this as the software is only good at making timelapse things.
I found out that I had to make smaller sized images from my first attempt. But you'll figure out how you want it. You can vary the time between each shot, etc.

When I did a TL of a storm rolling in that had a tornado still rolling horizontally I think I used 0.25second duration.

I tried movie maker originally but the problem there was it wouldn't let me export it... said it was too large.

 

[astroNikon]

hmmmm .. no help here then
I also have QuickTime Pro on a windows computer but you already have that.

But the smaller the size of the images themselves may help in the choppiness.
ie, if the JPEG file size is 10MB, each image is that size. which could become choppy. I made mine much smaller in file size and it was alot smoother.