Re: Time Lapse from DSLR stills

Hi Gypaetus
While I don't think you can change the duration for stills for import, you can change how long they are when placed on timeline in the Preferences>Editing>Stills "Editing Duration is…" Note: while the little arrow keys will only allow you to set in whole seconds, if you highlight the number in the field, you can then enter fractional seconds ( 0.03) for example. You'll need to conform this fraction to your framerate for a single frame.
This will set the duration of any still appended to the timeline. Make sure there is not any ranges within the clips in the browser. A range will overwrite the duration you just set.
Yes you can select multiple still clips within the Timeline and then change all clips duration. Highlight as you would normally do; Select All, select first clip and shift select last contiguous clip, select individual clips with command key. Now change duration; Modify>Change Duration or short cut key "Control+d". Type 1 and hit return. This sets all selected clips to 1 frame. I can do this in FCPX10.2.3, no problems.

You can also then select all the stills and make into a compound clip if you want. When you make a CC it more or less turns it into a video clip and you can apply transitions/effects to the CC instead of each individual photo.

Hope this helps, Greg

Many thanks for your reply, Greg!

We will try it asap - it is a bit more complicated for us, as our FCP X version is in German language, therefore using different terms.

Best regards!

You can also import the stills into a Quicktime movie. Just open Quicktime, then open the folder with the stills and choose "open as image sequence" or some other such nonsense. You can then choose the framerate. The QT movie will be the same resolution as your photos but if you put it in a 1080p sequence, for example, you can pan and zoom around and all that stuff.

But what I usually do is use After Effects to compile my stills and export a 1080p or whatever movie file.

Joe, as I mentioned in my first posting: I succeeded already well with the QT conversion you suggested, even in full 18 mill. pixel resolution on my old McBPro (don't ask about playback of these files: every 6 seconds a frame or so...). Anyway it's a very practicable solution allowing even some moving Ken Burns Effect throughout the larger frame.

To get the very best results I would prefer the grading of the original stills (even in RAW) - here I was told that Adobe's Lightroom has the easier approach compared to Photoshop, as it is possible to apply the impovement changes via copy/paste to all following stills.

Our problem ist that the FCP X machine has just installed the basic QT player and Photoshop Elements - so we better rely currently on FCP X's abilities to create the .mov files, - such as Greg suggested.
(Both computers are not at the same location).