Tutorial: Creating a Moving Timelapse Effect in Adobe Premiere Pro CC

This tutorial will show you how to create jib/slider movement by using 2K footage in your 1080p Adobe Premiere Pro CC project. Let's get started.

Figure 1 (below) shows the project we'll be working with in this tutorial: a 2K video loaded into Premiere Pro. I'm using a 5-minute clip recorded with the GoPro HERO3.

Figure 1. Our 2K clip in Premiere Pro. Click the image to see it at full size.

Creating the 1080 Sequence

To begin, we'll create a 1080 sequence by choosing New Item > Sequence and navigating to the 1080p sequence settings. For this project, we'll choose AVCHD 1080p24 (Figure 2, below).

Figure 2. Choosing our sequence settings. Click the image to see it at full size.

Next, drag only the video onto your timeline by clicking the Drag Video Only icon (Figure 3, below) under the preview window in the Source Monitor. Premiere Pro will prompt you to change the 1080 sequence settings to match the 2K source clip. Click Keep Existing Settings.

Figure 3. Dragging in video only.

Speeding up the Clip

We want this timelapse to run about 10 seconds. This means we'll need to change the speed of the clip by right-clicking it in the timeline and choosing Speed/Duration. In the Clip Speed/Duration dialog that opens, change the speed from 100% to 3500% (Figure 4, below). 

Figure 4. Speeding up the clip.

One nice thing in this dialog is that Premiere Pro immediately recalculates the duration of the clip and displays it here. Now our clip is much shorter, and we can start to see how much we've compressed the timing of our footage.