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I have 238gb of timelapse photos which was taken over a period of twenty days and all the photos are split up into 20 folders. I would like to put this together into a timelapse, I tried using Premiere Pro but that is taking very very long, any tips on putting it together fast btw Im on a Mac, thanks.

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How many pictures should be shown per second? What's their folder layout like? –  slhck Jun 10 '12 at 10:11
The folders are arranged by date and the images are 18megapixel and the total video should span for 1 1/2 minutes. –  Dragan Marjanovic Jun 10 '12 at 10:16
You still haven't told us how many pictures there are. We'd need this info to find out the frame rate you want. Also, don't you want the photos to be compressed before? (Also, what version of OS X do you run?) –  slhck Jun 10 '12 at 10:17
60928 photos and im on Mac OS X Lion and they are in Jpeg format. –  Dragan Marjanovic Jun 10 '12 at 10:34
Finally, what is their native resolution and what should the video be like? 1080p? Are you fine with cropping the pictures? Or do you want borders? –  slhck Jun 10 '12 at 10:47
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Well, you could use ffmpeg, which is cross platform... Granted it's all command line stuff, @Slhck spelled out how to do it with ffmpeg in his answer here but if you read through the command line options for ffmpeg as well, you'll soon see that you can make a movie at your uncropped resolution of 5185*3456 at 30fps... but I tell ya, that will be one freakin HUGE file. Your choice though.

You could use Open Image Sequence which is included with Quicktime. Again, the files needed to be numbered sequentially. The Quicktime 7 manual. But, you open the Quicktime player, File, Open Image Sequence. Choose the Frame Rate, and Export it as a movie.


You can also do it with iMovie. Here's a tutorial on that.. granted it is for iMovie 09, but the general process is the same.

... and here is a list of software (some free, some not) at Macupdate for making stop motion movies.


60,928 images? You want the video to run for 90 seconds? That just hit me. The human eye perceives motion at a minimum of 13 frames per second (any less and we see frames instead of the motion), and movies in the theater display at 24 frames per second. DVDs display at the equivalent of 29.97 frames per second (essentially 30 fps). So, if we assume 30 fps, 90 seconds worth of video is only 2700 images. You want to shoot for 677 frames per second? Seriously?

So, here's my first tip to you. Reduce the number of images you want to work with! you only need 2700 to achieve your 90 seconds, and working with 2700 images will take far less time than 60928. In fact, you probably won't have to change the software you are using. Take every 20th image (technically every 22nd image) and you'd have 2700 images that would span the entire sequence of pictures.

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+1 for QuickTime 7. It might require Pro, but it's by far the easiest. –  NReilingh Jun 10 '12 at 15:20
The tutorial misses a few options, I've covered the slideshow thing though: How to turn images into a video slideshow with sound –  slhck Jun 10 '12 at 15:25
@slhck yeah, the guy who wrote it was making 200x200 10fps movies, and the tutorial ended up being slated towards his project. But the tools still do the trick. –  Bon Gart Jun 10 '12 at 15:29
@OliverSalzburg Are you disagreeing with me, that he should in fact be trying to shoot for 600+ fps? Because it seems that you are being vague here. I mean, sure... shooting for 60fps could look nice, but that's still only using 5400 source images, as opposed to 61k. So, what are you saying , exactly? –  Bon Gart Jun 10 '12 at 16:07
@OliverSalzburg I can agree with that. However, he has expressed an issue with the amount of time this project is taking him, and what you propose would increase the amount of time it would take him to make his movie. The main reason why I suggest reducing the number of images is to solve his issue with how long this is taking him. –  Bon Gart Jun 10 '12 at 16:13
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There is Time lapse assembler which works great for basic timelapse creation.

Once you have the video you can import it into something like Final Cut Pro for fine tuning.

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