Creating One-Minute Time Lapse Videos

Making one-minute time lapse videos is an incredibly useful skill to learn. Sure, it’s lovely to have that 20-minute or 30-minute narrated walkthrough of how to paint something. But then it’s also very helpful for marketing to have a one-minute time lapse version, start to finish.

The one-minute video version can then be posted on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok – all platforms that have a short length limit. You can use those other feeds to catch viewers’ attention and then direct them to YouTube or Facebook or wherever else you have the full length video posted.

Here’s how to do this in Adobe Premiere. If you’re using another software package, let us know what it is and we’ll help you figure out the steps.

Adobe Premiere

Open up your video file in Adobe Premiere. You probably already have it in there from making the full length video. For this short version, don’t bother with any title screens or anything else. You just want the video itself.

Click on the video-audio pairing to select it. Right-click and unlink the audio-video. Click OFF the video-audio so they are unselected. Then click just on the audio track. Delete it. Otherwise you’ll get chipmunk-audio when you shrink the time.

Right-click on the video track. Go into Time Stretch. You want the number to be BIGGER THAN 100 to speed it up. If your clip is 10 minutes and you want it to be 1 minute, change that 100 to 1000. See what the time is. If it’s still longer than 1 minute, increase that 1000 slowly until you get under 1 minute.

For YouTube / Facebook – Publish/Share, Computer, MPEG, and I use HDTV 1080 24p. The file it makes will be great for those two platforms.

For Instagram / Twitter / TikTok – Publish/Share, Mobile, iPad, iPad widescreen high quality. This is the file format those platforms use. When loading onto TikTok make sure you rotate your video on the first screen so it fills the window.

Ask with any questions!

One thought to “Creating One-Minute Time Lapse Videos”

  1. I saw a tutorial where they clicked 100’s of photos. I tried it, but the result was not fun, because the light settings in every shot were different. Clearly, I am not a pro with lights. But this tutorial sounds so much better. I am going to try it, as soon as I am able to get my hands on Premiere Pro.

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