Timelapse resolution - 720p

[Jeff Moltenberry]

Just me or is 720p the maximum video resolution for timelapses? My normal video footage is all 4k.

 

[Hercules_One]

I don't think so... The limitation I see is that only allows 5 second interval on jpg format, RAW is 10 seconds minimum

 

[Jeff Moltenberry]

Did some research and appears the best solution is to use the image files (higher resolution) in a 24fps sequence in PremierePro or tool like LRTimelapse. Wish DJI would have stated the timelapse resolution somewhere that was easy to find. Not on their specs page.

 

[Hanu Eskelinen]

So is the 720P only resolution for Timelapse? Or is there any set up that can be done to make OSMO produce 4K timelapse footage?

 

[Jeff Moltenberry]

So is the 720P only resolution for Timelapse? Or is there any set up that can be done to make OSMO produce 4K timelapse footage?

I've looked in the manual and it makes no mention of timelapse video resolution and/or how to change. It appears to be a hard-coded setting you can't change (timelapse video = 720p).

If you're okay with 720p, i say stick with the video the Osmo generates internally.
If you need 1080p and higher, then use the photos the Osmo generates in DJI Media Maker or LRTimelapse to generate a higher resolution timelapse video. The catch is the playback won't be smooth. The gimbal makes slight pan/tilt changes throughout the timelapse that aren't stabilized in the photos.

I tried to lock the gimbal using the DJI Go app. After starting timelapse it immediately undoes the lock.
One option I thought of is to use a rubber band around the trigger to lock the gimbal in place.

 

[Hanu Eskelinen]

I did some research in other topics in this forum and found that if you shoot Timlapse setting you have to check that you are shooting with setting "Video and JPEG" it lets you shoot full resolution JPEGs in TIMELAPSE folder. They are 4000x2250 in size. While the video in its folder still is 720P. So you need external post programming if you want to make better resolution timelapses. There is many ways to do timelapses later from sequence of jpegs. Photoshop is one of them, but not so easy for beginner, here is one tutorial Creating a time-lapse video. There is also one stand alone program that seems to be very easy and effective to use, i just downloaded their trial version and it supports 4K plus. Make a time lapse video from photos in a few clicks!

 

[Hanu Eskelinen]

What comes to camera jiggeling during the timelapse, what i have been testing it appears to be found in some of my footage and in some dont. Weird.

 

[Jeff Moltenberry]

I did some research in other topics in this forum and found that if you shoot Timlapse setting you have to check that you are shooting with setting "Video and JPEG" it lets you shoot full resolution JPEGs in TIMELAPSE folder. They are 4000x2250 in size. While the video in its folder still is 720P. So you need external post programming if you want to make better resolution timelapses. There is many ways to do timelapses later from sequence of jpegs. Photoshop is one of them, but not so easy for beginner, here is one tutorial Creating a time-lapse video. There is also one stand alone program that seems to be very easy and effective to use, i just downloaded their trial version and it supports 4K plus. Make a time lapse video from photos in a few clicks!

Read my post above. I did this with two different softwares and the result wasn't pleasing.

 

[Jeff Moltenberry]

What comes to camera jiggeling during the timelapse, what i have been testing it appears to be found in some of my footage and in some dont. Weird.

Thanks for affirming this. I've also submitted a ticket to DJI support to see what they say.

 

[Hanu Eskelinen]

I think it should not be a big problem to fix this in next firmware upgrade.

 

[FishTales]

If you need to make a time lapse form individual jpeg stills (really the best quality), there is a FREE and super easy way to do it. Download a copy of Quicktime Player 7 from Apple. Note: This is an OLD version of Quicktime player, the current version is dumbed down and won't perform this function for you. So open Quicktime Player 7, then from the file menu choose "Open Image Sequence" (or Command Shift O). It will let you navigate to the folder where your jpegs are. All you do is select the FIRST one. They will be numbered sequentially and Quicktime will figure out the rest of the files in the TL. It will then ask you what you want your movie's frame rate to be (ie 30fps, 25fps, 24fps, etc). After you select this option, your finished time lapse opens in a window instantly. It will probably be too big for your screen, so just select "Fit to Screen" from the view menu (or Command 3) and it will scale the window to fit your screen. To save it, I would suggest that you do a "Save As" and then make sure that you check the box at the bottom to "Save a reference movie" If you do that it won't copy every frame into the movie making it potentially gigabytes in size. It will be a tiny .mov file that just references al of the frames in the folder. I do lots of time lapse and it really only takes about 60 seconds for me to assemble one from a sequence of jpegs this way.

Here's my actual workflow start to finish:
1. Import the jpegs into Lightroom. I put them all in one folder, and I usually have Lightroom rename them to be something descriptive + an incrementing counter such as: AngkorWatCloudsXXX (the XXX is generated sequentially by Lightroom.

2. Do whatever corrections are needed to the color, contrast, shadows, highlights, vibrance, etc. I only correct the first frame, then I copy the corrections and paste them to all the other frames in the sequence. Please, please, please don't just use the images as they come out of the camera. There are ALWAYS improvements that you can make in post production. Even little tweaks make a big difference down the line.

3. Export the jpegs (now color corrected and nicely named) to a folder to be used for the time lapse. I always export them full size, but you could, for instance export them as 1920x1080 if you want. But I would prefer to keep everything at full scale as long as possible and only scale down at the time I export the final film.

4. Open Quicktime Player 7. Command Shift O. Select the FIRST jpeg i just exported. Select frame rate. Boom! It's done.

5. Save as a "reference movie" to the same folder the jpegs are in. You can actually save it anywhere, but I think it's cleaner to keep them together.

6. Open my video editor (FCP X in my case but Premier would be the same).

7. Import the reference movie. It's ready to drop in your timeline and use as a normal .mov file.

 

[Hanu Eskelinen]

DJI Media Maker does the same that Quicktime.

 

[Hanu Eskelinen]

I was shooting some Timelapse today and was thinking about when does the gimbal actually been activated in Timelapse cituations. I think they said in operation manual that gimbal starts to work when you lapse interval is set 2 second or longer.

 

[Hanu Eskelinen]

I think i just found something very interesting. If you look the 720P automatic footage that OSMO outs to it 100MEDIA folder you can see clearly some sharp movements in it time to time. BUT if you let DJI Media maker do the job for example for 4K footage, small tilts in the footage are gone. So DJI Media maker can obviously handle problems like small shakes happended during recording the footage.

 

[FishTales]

DJI Media Maker does the same that Quicktime.

Actually, no. I decided to do a comparison between QT Player 7 creating an image sequence and DJI Media Maker. I opened one of the folders that I had already processed through QT Player 7. The first thing that DJI Media Maker said was that it could not make an automatic determination whether it should make a panorama or a time lapse. So I manually selected time lapse. Then it proceeded to create the time lapse .mov file. It spent 12 minutes and 30 seconds to make the .mov, QT Player 7 took less than 30 seconds to make and save a reference movie. QT Player 7 would have taken longer if I had it make a self contained movie, but as I mentioned in my previous post, you are just copying frames that already exist on your disk, so it's a big waste of both time and space. The QT Player 7 file size was only about 250kb, but the DJI Media Maker file was 267mb! To make matters worse, DJI Media Maker made a movie consisting of just black frames. Apparently it doesn't play well with jpegs that are not taken directly from the DJI card. I suspect that it's a naming issue, the images in my test time lapse had been processed in Lightroom and renamed to something more descriptive. This is probably why DJI Media Maker didn't automatically make the time lapse. But it should have handled the images properly when instructed to do it manually. So it might work if you take the images through Lightroom, but preserve the original naming scheme. That would be sort of a mini deal breaker for me because I want files named in such a way that a year or two from now I can look at them and get some useful info. If DJI Media Maker won't process a time lapse because it has been through Lightroom or some other editing app, that would be a huge deal breaker. I'm not going to test it further because I can't see a superior outcome for my workflow.

 

[Hanu Eskelinen]

250 kb? Must be high quality 4K video you have there? Eh?

 

[FishTales]

250 kb? Must be high quality 4K video you have there? Eh?

You don't understand the concept and the power of a reference movie. The test movie that I made to check out whether DJI Media Maker could be a useful tool for assembling time lapses was made from a folder of 450 images. Each image was a 4608x2592 jpeg about 5mb in size. The total size of all the images was 1.9gb. So it's greater than 4K to start with. When you make a "reference movie" from an Image Sequence in Quicktime Player 7, all that reference movie has to do is point to the physical locations of the actual individual frames. Think of it as not much more than the "header" on a movie file. So my 250kb reference movie is pointing to 1.9gb of image quality, but the 267mb DJI Media Maker file is using only about 14% of that original data because DJI Media Maker re-compresses that 1.9gb down into 267mb (that's why it took 12.5 minutes). So not only would you wind up storing a lot of additional data on your disk if you used DJI Media Maker, but you would be storing it at a lower quality that the original media that is sitting right beside it on the disk. Does that seem smart to you? It gets even worse. When you use the clip in your final edit, you are using a clip that has been re-compressed, so you have already peeled some of your original quality off the top. Unnecessary re-compressing is always a bad thing. If you use a reference movie instead, you don't re-compress your scenes until the very last stage of production when you are outputting the finished video at the desired resolution. So the bottom line is that my workflow is way faster and far higher quality than using DJI Media Maker.

 

[Hanu Eskelinen]

Got it! What Quicktime Version is useful?

 

[FishTales]

Got it! What Quicktime Version is useful?

You have to use Quicktime Player 7. They have removed some of the functionality in the current version (dumbed it down). Even though it is not the current version, it is still available for download. I can't put a link here for you, but if you just google "Download Quicktime Player 7" you will get the link.