samecontent design

After hand-picking 531 stills from thousands of pictures taken by WKAR’s roof top-installed webcam, I tested multiple technologies for making a time lapse video, which resulted in a little trial and error before the video began to take shape. My first attempt was to use Camtasia to record an iPhoto slideshow then edit that in iMovie to speed it up. The resulting transitions between photos were not smooth enough.

So I grabbed all of the images as separate files and dropped them into an iMovie project, but there was a glaring flaw in this method from the start. Not only did it slow the program down dramatically (even on a dual-core MacBook Pro!), but it was very difficult to edit the length of image as displayed on screen en masse.

After exhausting the first few “quick and easy” options available to me, I researched several options and found that a plugin for Adobe Photoshop’s Lightroom software could produce time lapses by steadying color levels across a set of images. It worked perfectly and the video was featured at a major fundraiser for The Broad, at which we revealed our first acquisition.