How to create a time lapse video with free software

What is a time lapse video?
It is a video created (most commonly) from a series of photographs taken over a period of time that speeds up the time, essentially making everything run in high speed. As such several hours worth of photographs can be condensed down into several minutes of video.

It is very effective for watching the changes of light or the movement of people and objects over the course of hours, days, weeks, months and sometimes even years. Some examples have been time lapse videos that cover the entire construction of buildings or the change in a landscape over a year highlighting the changes of season.

It can also be used to view a high speed video of food decomposing or crayons melting. I'm sure you get the idea.

Here is a short time lapse I did some time ago using webcam footage. Please note: This was done prior to me working out the method in this tutorial, using low quality webcam images. See the end for examples created using this method.

Getting starting

In order to effectively create a time lapse video you will need a camera. Really any camera will do, but unless it is capable of being controlled by a remote (DSLR) or has time lapse features built in already (GoPro) then it will be a very manual process and hard to manage.

This is because you need hundreds of photos over a period of time. Standing with a compact camera and pushing the shutter button every 5 seconds for 3 hours isn't really my idea of fun. Not only that but it also opens it up to wobble and distorsions in the images which will affect the quality of the video.

So, ideally you want a GoPro or a DSLR with an intervalometer. ( A remote capable of opening the shutter repeatedly with a set interval). The manual control of the DSLR will also help with exposing the photo correctly.

Find a composition

Find a place suitable for capturing an interesting time lapse. It may be the crowds of people walking through a city, or perhaps a sunrise or sunset. I will leave that part to you to determine. Once you've found your composition, take photos.... lots of them. The more photos you have, the longer the video clip will be.

Taking the shots

The interval you use between shots is up to you but as a general rule, the quicker/shorter the interval the more smooth the end result will be as there is less time passing between each capture. The longer the interval the more jumpy the end result will be as there is a larger period of time passing between each image.

Having said that. While an interval of a couple of seconds will be very smooth, it will also be the slowest in terms of time advancing in the end result. You might compress 2 hours down to a 20 seconds for example. Whereas an interval of 15 seconds between shots might result in the 2 hours of images compressing down to 5 seconds.*

* I just made those figures up. I'm too lazy to calculate it. It's to try and explain the concept.

Image quality

Image quality is really up to you. If you have the gear, and the time or you want the best possible outcome then I suggest shooting RAW. If you can only do JPEG then that's going to be okay as well.

I am not going to get into the actual procedure of batch processing hundreds or thousands of images but suffice to say it is possible to make some adjustments to the first image and apply those same adjustments to the rest of the sequence using software like Raw Therapee.

(Feel free to comment below and let me know if you are interested in a tutorial on Batch Image Processing using RAW Therapee)

Import the files

I have just copied the time lapse images from the camera into a folder for the video and then into an images subfolder. (In my case I was shooting RAW and did a quick batch process so my final images are in a converted folder as we need them as JPEG to encode to video.)

To make it easy for the encoding software it is ideal to have the images in a numbered sequence. This can be done by selecting all the images (Ctrl + A) then right clicking the first image and choosing rename. Call it timelapse or whatever you want. The operating system will then rename the images in a numbered sequence as below.

Making the video

Here is where the magic happens, but first, if you don't have it already, go and download VirtualDub. It is a small download for a very powerful application.

VirtualDub website

When you first run the VirtualDub application you will see a dull gray screen.

We will start by loading our image sequence by clicking File -> Open Video File or Ctrl+O
Navigate to the directory containing your image sequence from earlier. Select the first image of the sequence which should end with the number 1 and make sure Automatically load linked segments is checked.

Once loaded you will (depending on size of images) see part of the image in the empty gray area. Something like this.

If you Right Click the image and select 25% (or whatever works) for your screen size you should notice it will resize to be more suitable. You can go ahead and do the same on the right hand side of the screen as well.

If you haven't guessed it already we have panels for input and output.

Next, we want to add some filters and adjust the frame rate of the video to be suitable.

The first filter we want to add is the Resize filter which will enable us to specify the size of the video output. For a high definition video you could choose 1920 x 1080

Click Video -> Filters (or Ctrl + F)
Click Add
Select the resize filter and add it
In the options dialog you can set the size of the output video. I recommend setting the aspect ratio as per the screenshot below to 16:9 and then you can set the absolute size about and it will remain constrained to that aspect ratio.

Secondly I would suggest downloading the MSU Deflicker filter from here. It can be installed by unzipping it into the plugins directory under your VirtualDub directory. (It does require VirtualDub to be restarted)

If you choose to do this it can help compensate from flickering that can be caused by slightly different exposures from image to image. Well worth doing, especially if your camera was in something other than full manual mode.

Add it with the default settings to begin with. I've found them to be quite suitable for most cases.

You should have noticed after the resize filter, the change in the output panel on the main screen. However, there is another thing we need to do before we encode the video.

We need to set the frame rate. 25 frames per second is a good starting point. I recommend starting there and if you don't like the output after that you can adjust it up or down to suit the look you feel is best.

Select Video -> Frame Rate or (Ctrl+R)

Leave the bottom half of the framerate options as they are, just select Change frame rate to (fps):  and set your desired frame rate.

Now, we are almost done. You should have something that looks a bit like this. (Obviously with your images, not mine)

Before we go ahead and encode the video we are going to want to setup some sort of compression, we do this by selecting a codec to use for the video. Select Video -> Compression or (Ctrl + P)

The dialog that opens will list the various codecs available on your system that VirtualDub is able to use. I personally have been using Xvid (which, if not in the list can be downloaded here)

You can use whichever suits you best.

For Xvid you can adjust the options to keep the file size reasonable without losing too much quality to the compression. The screenshot above shows the settings I last used on the videos I will have at the end.

Alright... still with me?

The final step is to encode the video. To do this we select File -> Save as AVI or (F7)

Choose a location to save the video to and give it a name.

Then wait for the encoding to finish and once it has, you can open the folder where you saved it and play the video to view the final result.

Here is an example of a couple of short time lapse clips I created using this method described above. In these videos the photographs were taken using my Nikon D5100 DSLR in RAW mode and batch processed with a preset from Raw Therapee prior to then creating the time lapse using VirtualDub.

Hope this helps get you started making time lapse videos. If you wan't, feel free to comment below with a link to your video.