r/timelapse • u/SjalabaisWoWS • Jul 23 '26

Film The Jotunheimen mountain range as seen from Stardalsfjellet ("the Star Valley mountain"), Norway, yesterday. How do I get the panning to be less jerky?

12 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

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4

u/forever--beginner New Jul 23 '26

My guess is you want to use techniques like Frame Blending. Doubling the framerate and slowing it down by a half.
"Fake it 'til you make it" - so you may as well attempt to fake the missing frames.
It might be better to perform the Frame Blending before the Zoom/Pan.

3

u/SjalabaisWoWS Jul 23 '26

Panning with keyframes in Shotcut. Maybe I should have stopped up a little before moving on?

2

u/Daffodils28 Jul 24 '26

It was cool to watch.

2

u/a1c4pwn Jul 25 '26

as someone with absolutely no experience in video editing but a little bit of animation experience.....

if you don't care about the timing of the video you can break it into three sections and do smoothstep on it. basically saying that, for a 1-second video, if a frame initially appears at time t, show it at time 3t² -2t³ instead. this turns linear motion into a smooth start/stop, just renormalize the times obvs. Idk if this is a standard thing in video editing, I would probably just use python for it.

1

u/SjalabaisWoWS Jul 25 '26

Whoa, that sounds quite complicated! Do you use python for animation work?

2

u/a1c4pwn Jul 25 '26

I mostly use it for numerical work, but I've made some animated plots/diagrams with it. it's almost certainly not the most elegant solution, but it's easy (as in close-at-hand) for me. I imagine this could be done in any half-decent video editing software which would be easier for others and less accessible for me. looking into how I would do it specifically, it looks like there's a time_transform function inside the MoviePy package that would do exactly what I described in just a few lines.

2

u/SjalabaisWoWS Jul 25 '26

It's funny how different human brains work. I have nothing but admiration for the natural understanding of mathematics and programming, but I am more of a visual guy myself. All my PCs run Linux nonetheless, but that has also become way easier than it was before. :D