Clouds Over the Mountains I know partially how to make a video like this. I know how to load multiple images into a program known as Starstax for the cumulating effect, then at least theoretically I can make a time lapse with Photoshop. But how does the video transition to the next sequence? Do you just need to make one video at a time, then manually merge them somehow?
While the appeal of such imagery in the linked timelapse is subjective, I personally would not use StarStax for anything other than stars. Clouds in images processed by StarStax usually have undesirable artifacts, certainly seen in that video. The infrared imaging is interesting, but I personally feel that cloud movement in a time-lapse looks best if the clouds still look natural. Just my subjective opinion.
The short answers is yes, a basic video editing program is needed to combine different video clips together into a finished video. If you have a Mac, you have all you need to edit and render a time-lapse video, using Quicktime and iMovie. Steps:
- Process all your individual images as desired and make sure they are in sequential order. Organize the the files into the sequence you want for each video clip; it's easiest to make a folder for each image sequence you want to render into a video clip.
- Open Quicktime on your Mac. In the top right of the desktop click on File > Open Image sequence. Select one of the folders created in the first step, then click Choose media.
- A small window pops up and here is where you can choose the resolution of the video (Actual Size, 4k, 1080p, etc), the frames per second of the rendered video clip (up to 60fps), the type of video encoding (H.264 is probably best), and then click open. Quicktime will then render a video of that image sequence in the folder. Do this for each folder of images, so you end up with however many video clips you want in the final video.
- Once you have the video clips rendered, you can open iMovie and begin editing the final video. Using iMovie is a topic in itself, but it will do what you want to do, which is combine the different video clips into one video. You can select the type of transitions you want between scenes, fades in and out, titles, etc. You can add music too, though the free music in iMovie is very limited.
If you have a pc, I don't know if Windows has a built-in video editor or not, but I think my teen uses CapCut for video editing in Windows.
Hope that helps
