USING A GOPRO FOR ASTRO TIMELAPSE FULL

So, just a little bit of visual trickery with the Time Blend effects. Pretty cool effect, and this matches some of the looks of long exposure photography that you might see. And what's gonna happen is that as the stars move, they're going to create of trail of light behind them.

USING A GOPRO FOR ASTRO TIMELAPSE FULL

This is a type of effect that really requires a Preview, so let's Preview that at Full quality for a second, and take a look at the results. Now you won't see it if you just simply park the playhead. When I invoke the RAM Preview, notice how that draws. What I want to do is add those up, so I'll use the Lighten Blending mode, and set this to about 95%, which adds up the values over time. It's gonna take frames, sample them, and Paste them on top.

Drag that onto your PreComp Layer, and what we need to do is Paste the values. This is an effect from Cycore, and it's included with After Effects, so if you type in Time Blend, you'll find Time Blend FX. Now, on the outside of this, I'm gonna apply Time Blend. This'll force the Frame Blending to happen first. This forces all of the frame blending to happen inside and I'll Move all those attributes in there, and let's call this Night1PreComp. To do that, I'm gonna select this Layer and Pre-compose everything inside of it. The key to this effect is to add up details over time. You'll note that I've included another one in here for reference that you could take a look at if you'd like. Let's put this into the project, and we'll move this into the source folder, and I'm gonna duplicate this one and rename it Trails. It is, so that's good, and I'm gonna clean things up a little bit. To help, let's make sure Frame Blending's on. What I want to do, though, is get a bit more streaks. Now that's 400% magnification, that's pretty high. Let's zoom in a little bit here, and we'll take a look at the stars up close. You could see that the stars move through the sky, as do the clouds. Here's the first version of the shot with the stars moving. Fortunately, there's a little bit of trickery we can add in post to fake star trails that matches this print. So how are you gonna do time lapse? Imagine a time lapse with three or four frames, it's not very effective, right? You're not gonna show the passage of time because it moves so quickly. The challenge with this is pretty simple. And essentially, with the long exposure, you are capturing that movement over time. You're literally getting the star trails moving across the sky as the stars arc. The challenge with astrophotography and star trails is that it's an incredibly long exposure.

Using a gopro for astro timelapse