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ASTRO TIMELAPSE using a PHONE or DSLR // Feat. Google Pixel 4a - 4K Nightlapse
Easy tutorial on how to capture a astrophotography timelapse using a phone (like the Google Pixel 4a) or a DSLR/mirrorless. Astro timelapses (or nightlapses) might seem scary and complex to create but they are actually quite easy to create. It's basically a succession of photos of sharps stars playing at a fast speed. This tutorial about astro timelapse will teach you how to capture a timelapse, how to use an intervalometer on your phone or DSLR and finally how process and merge the image together.
✨BEFORE YOU WATCH THIS VIDEO ✨
🔗 Capturing stars with your PHONE https://youtu.be/LwnMOsq0Mpk
🔗 Capturing stars your DSLR https://youtu.be/r0Rzd07gSd0
📸 GEAR FEATURED IN THIS VIDEO 🎥
🔗 Google Pixel 4a https://geni.us/google-pixel-4a
🔗 Canon 6D Mk II https://geni.us/canon-6d-mkii
🔗 Canon 16-35mm Mk II f/2.8 https://geni.us/canon-lens-16-35
🔗 Canon Intervalometer https://geni.us/lba-intervalometer
✨ WATCH NEXT ✨
- Creating startrails https://youtu.be/zceHyYOH0lQ
- Capturing the stars with the DJI Pocket 2 https://youtu.be/cKYHj26coE8
- Creative techniques for video & photos https://youtu.be/EY4kOFHPilo
✋ COME SAY HI!! ✋
- Instagram: @loic.bellemare.alford (http://bit.ly/lba_instagram)
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/loic294
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lbaphotographie
📖 CHAPTERS 📖
00:00 - Introduction
00:31- What is a timelapses & how to calculate the number of photos
01:57 - Getting sharp stars
02:31 - Canon built-in intervalometer
04:18 - External intervalometer
05:59 - Phone intervalometer (ProCam X app)
07:48 - Stiching using an editing software
12:45 - Stiching using TLDF (dedicated software)
17:13 - Conclusion - Thank you!
🖼 SHOP FOR PRINTS 🖼
- My online store: https://store.lbaphotographie.ca
🎶 MY MUSIC 🎶
- Affiliate link for Epidemic Sound: https://www.epidemicsound.com/referral/iu5gau/
📸 GEAR I USE ON YOUTUBE 📸
https://kit.co/loic.bellemare.alford/youtube-gear
- DJI Pocket 2 Creator Combo https://geni.us/dji-pocket-2-combo
- 128 gb MicroSD card https://geni.us/sandisk-extreme-128gb
- Canon 6D Mk https://geni.us/canon-6d-mkii
- Google Pixel 4a https://geni.us/google-pixel-4a
- Canon ZOOM LENS EF24-105mm F4L IS II USM https://geni.us/canon-lens-24-105
- Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8 Lens https://geni.us/canon-lens-16-35
- Canon EF 70-200mm f/4.0L-IS II USM Lens https://geni.us/canon-lens-70-200
- VANGUARD VEO 2 265CB CARBON FIBER TRIPOD https://geni.us/vanguard-veo-265cb
- DJI MAVIC AIR https://geni.us/lba-dji-mavic-air
🌍 MY PERSONAL WEBSITE 🌍
- 0:00 Introduction
- 0:31 What is a timelapses & how to calculate the number of photos
- 1:57 Getting sharp stars
- 2:31 Canon built-in intervalometer
- 4:18 External intervalometer
- 5:59 Phone intervalometer (ProCam X app)
- 7:48 Stiching using an editing software
- 12:45 Stiching using TLDF (dedicated software)
- 17:13 Conclusion - Thank you!
[Music] hey everyone i hope you liked this little introduction of time lapses and right now i'm in the middle of my lake heading towards a rock to talk about how to capture time lapses [Music] for those who don't know me yet i'm like ben mahal for a young photographer and filmmaker on the journey to become better at this art for those who don't know what's a time lapse the time lapse is actually simply a series of pictures that are played really fast so for most of my videos they're actually at 24 frames per seconds and that means that i have 24 pictures for every second is a video so if i want to have a 10 second time lapse i'm actually going to need to take 240 pictures but if you don't want to do this math in your head you don't understand it too much you can use an app like photo pills and it's a paid app instead of the stores but i'm not sponsored i just really like it it's really useful when taking pictures of the stars and one of the modes they have right here is called time lapse so if we come here you can select what you want to determine so here i'm going to put event duration and i'm going to set the shooting interval to 15 seconds uh why 15 seconds i'm going to come back in an instant to that um i'm going to say i want to have a clip length let's say of also 15 seconds uh we have 24 frames per second for our video and that means that the event duration and we can see it here is actually one hour and 30 minutes so that means we need to be taking pictures non-stop for a full hour and 30 minutes to get our result so now let's go place the camera talk about the gear the settings and more about how to take the time lapse hey it's future me here i've got a lot of questions on how to capture 10 glasses using your phone so i'll answer that just a little bit later in the video i highly suggest you go watch my video on how to get sharp stars using your dslr if that's what you're using or on how to get stars using your cell phone if you're using a cell phone like the google pixel 4a because i won't talk about the camera settings you need to use to get sharp stars instead of this video and that's one thing that's very important when taking time lapses now let's move on to talk about how to capture multiple pictures using your dslr and if you're using a phone you can skip to this part of the video before taking this shot we actually need to set something else because we're gonna be taking 360 shots to get a time lapse so for this you need to use what's called an intervalometer and for now we're going to use the one that's built in to the camera here so if you're in manual settings and you need to be in manual for it to work and you come in your picture modes here and you go on interval timer and you enable it you can then set the details here and set to take a picture at every zero we're gonna set it actually zero seconds and that's because we're already waiting 15 seconds to for the photo to be taken and we want a second shot to be taken right away so we're gonna set this one up then the number of shots we're gonna leave it unlimited for now because we're gonna be over 99 shots because we need 360. so for now we can click ok uh go back to the menu here and now you can press your shutter to start taking the pictures it's really important to get sharp stars when taking a time lapse because everything frame and like i said before every frame is every picture you're taking needs to be sharp because let's say you have a video and every frame you're taking in the video is blurry the whole video becomes blurry so that's the same thing that applies when you're taking a time lapse you want to make sure that every single frame you're taking or picture you're taking is actually pin sharp to be sure that your time lapse in the end is also going to be pin sharp i finished taking the 460 shots and as you saw it's actually kind of painful using the built-in intervalometer because each time you change your settings you need to go back into the menu change the settings of the intervalometer and start all over again and you also have no process of how it's going how many shots are left this is where an external interferometer becomes very useful so the information is simply plugged inside the camera right here but for it to work you need to come inside of bulb mode here and make sure that camera changes that mode and that basically tells the camera that now you're going to be controlling the shutter with another tool that's not the camera itself but now we're going to come on the intervalometer here and here we can set uh select first of all the delay we want to have between each shot for this i'm just not going to put any delay because i wanted each shot to be taken right away then we can set how long each shot should be so if we just come in the menu here i can set that each shot should be 15 seconds so i'm just gonna bring it up here um then i can set the interval so where i don't want any interval and then i can come here in the menu and actually also select how many shots i want so i can say i want 360 shots so just takes a little bit of time oops to get to the menu here so now once all my settings are dialed in inside of the intervalometer it's simply a question of coming here and pressing the start button and you're gonna hear right away the camera starting to take the shot and we're gonna see a countdown here telling me how much time is left so i have here the countdown from 15 um to zero and i have the number of shots that are left so right now we have 460 shots that are left so this is telling me exactly how much time is left for the shots and this is a lot more useful because even if i close the camera open it again i still have access to all my settings that are saved on the intervalometer and anytime i want to check how the progress is going i can come here and check it on here let's talk about how to use an intervalometer on your phone i'm going to be using the procam x app but you could use any other app from the app store this won't work using the astrophotography mode inside of the main camera app because the four minute exposure is way too long when taking uh time lapse so for here for my settings i'm just gonna make sure i have everything set up so i'm first going to set a 10 second shutter then i'm going to set iso to then i'm going to set the white balance to automatic focus to infinity and finally just make sure that i have the capture on raw files then what we want to change is go inside out for photo mode so if we come on the bottom right right here we'll actually be able to select interval shot and once we select this we want to come here and make sure that repeat is on unlimited and then that the interval is on zero this will allow to take pictures non-stop until we stop it using the phone so the only thing that is left now is to press the shutter button so let's start taking some shots for the time lapse and as we're going to see it's going to start taking pictures after every 10 seconds it's going to automatically take another one so i'm going to close the video light go inside and come back in one hour when it's done [Music] i'm completely taken the photos using my google pixel 4a so if you're enjoying this video why don't you go down and hit that like button or hit subscribe if you want to learn more about astrophotography filmmaking or photography and anyways see you in a few minutes inside to stitch all these photos together to create the final time lapse welcome back and in this part we're going to talk about how the post-processing works to create time lapses and there's actually two different part to this process the first one is editing the shots to get out the stars of the photos and the second one is using a software to stitch all the photos together to create the final video so for this we're going to jump right into lightroom here and i won't go into much details about the edit i did for this shot because it's exactly the same thing i did for sharp stars so here if we just quickly look at the settings here i have the exposure the contrast and it features things just to bring out a little bit of detail inside of the shots and then i bring up the saturation a little bit i add my s curve like i talked about i bring down the greens to remove the light from the south house right here and then i add a little bit of sharpening and remove the chromatic aberration and enable lens correction and just like i said the most important part in editing a shot of the stars is actually adding a gray gain filter here and bringing up the clarity to really make the stars pop so once this is done you can come here select all your shots using uh command a on mac control a on windows and then use the sync option here to synchronize all your shots so we can synchronize here i'm actually just gonna stop the process because i don't wanna wait for it to finish um but now we're gonna have the edit on all the shots if we come back to the library here we can then go on the export option and now we wanna export all the pictures as individual jpegs so we're just going to click here now we have the lightroom pop-up that appeared and now we can choose our destination here uh choose our file size so i would read for jpeg because i would have the maximum quality out of the pictures and the other pictures and other settings are just your normal export settings uh for jpeg so i'm not going to support it because i already did it before to save some time so if you come here in finder we're going to see we have our 360 photos already exported so the next step is uh stitching all these pictures together to create a video so there's two techniques to do it the first one is using editing software like premiere pro or any similar software to put them together inside a video or using a dedicated software uh to stitch them together so let's go uh and jump into premiere pro as a first example so here i'm gonna open premiere pro and now we want to jump into the assembly tab inside of premiere pro so we're going to come here then go into file uh import and we're going to import all the pictures so now you want to go on your drive here i'm using a nas to store all the files and if you want to learn more why it's a great option to have a nas as a filmmaker or photographer i actually did a video about that so you can check the link up here or down in the description so now if you go here i'm going to go inside of time lapses uh find my milky way shots here are the edited versions select them all then this is the very important part because you're selecting pictures that are individual you want to go down here on the option tab on windows is pretty similar it's going to appear right away and you want to select only the first shot not all the shots and then you're going to be able to select select the image sequence so for image sequence to work you need to be sure you have all the shots that are named with uh incremental numbers between them so it knows that they're all part of the same uh sequence so now that we click on image sequence you can import the shots it's going to click take it a few seconds here and it's actually really hard because these are really high res uh pictures i think it's about like six to eight k resolution so my computer is gonna have a hard time reading them now it's loaded you can simply come here drag it onto your timeline to create a new timeline and that's it so now you have your working time lapse and i'm just going to go straight away and export the video clip as a final time lapse so if you want to come here you can actually change your settings and you can use whatever settings you want i like exporting pretty high resolution so i'm probably going to come here in h.264 and go match source and go with adaptive high bit rate so this is going to export with a pretty high resolution if you wanted to go even more higher quality you could actually export it as per res or something like that but it's really up to you to decide which format you want to have it in the end so here i'm actually not going to export it right now we're going to go see uh the result i got using this technique right away so i actually have it right here [Music] now let's do the second technique uh to stitch it together and this is using a specialized software so i actually bought a software that's called tldf i'm not sponsored with them at all i tested a few different solutions and this was probably the best value for um the money you're paying so here to get this started we're actually just come here select our shots now we're gonna select all the shots using a command a we're gonna drag them inside of the program right here and we're gonna quickly see them appear now we can see the shots are important instead of tldf and it's starting to generate thumbnails and you can actually see uh timelapse working in the background so i'm just gonna wait for this to finish and come back to talk about the different options we have in the bottom of the interface right here now the thumbnails i created we're actually going to see right away a preview of the time lapse and if it's a little bit choppy right now it's not a big deal because that's not the final result it's just a preview of the idiots we're making so now we're just going to stop it and if we look at the options at the bottom here we first have the flicker and this is a very interesting option if you're taking a time lapse let's say at a sunset or something like that where the conditions might change during at that time so you probably leave your camera on auto settings uh to have a correct exposure at every shot so from the day to the night uh but creating that is actually gonna create different exposures on every single shot and this uh software can actually go in and modify the exposures for all the shots automatically so that's very useful to make sure that you have a consistent look uh at the output the second option that i always use when i'm creating time lapses at night is noise reduction so i actually don't apply any root noise reduction instead of lightroom i do all of it inside of here so i get better results when i do it at the end using here instead of applying it instead of lightroom because lightroom can have different results on every single shot that it's outputting where here you have a consistent result again using noise reduction then blend options i'm not going to go inside of this one because this simply blends multiple shots together but when you're creating time lapses of stars you don't want to have this option enabled because it's going to create these real lines um inside of your shot so you don't want to have this or we're just going to use a nose reduction the last option here is if you have a mask for your noise or something like that i can actually use it to remove these parts of the shots but i didn't have any of these when taking the shots so i'm not going to use it here so once you're ready and you're satisfied with the preview here you can actually hit preview so it's going to generate a better preview with the options you enable in the bottom here so i had the flicker on and noise reduction on so we're just going to wait a few more seconds for it to complete and see the result so now we have the preview of the time lapse here it's still a little bit choppy but like i said before it's not a big deal that's because i'm recording my screen right now which is a lot harder on the computer but here you have it so now it's working and you know that you're getting a nice result so once you're ready to export it you can come here down to render and then you can select your folder um so we're just gonna leave it inside here of my milky way folder we're gonna name it milky way example we're not going to output the images this is if you wanted to do something else with the images you could do that but i don't want to have this so i'm just going to output the video select h264 again so like i said and just like inside of latin you can also select prores if you want to have even higher quality video for the output um and the other options i'm going to leave it to 4k i don't want to have the auto crop like i said before i want to have the full resolution so i'm not going to put that option and for the frame rate usually i have my videos at 24 frames per seconds so i'm going to select this option and i'm going to start the render so again it's going to take a few minutes to complete the result so for this i'm going to speed up the process and talk about the result once we get it so now we have the final result that's playing and i'm pretty satisfied uh with this so using either premiere pro or a dedicated software is really up to you depending on what you do so if i just want to do something really quickly i might go side inside of a premiere pro in an existing project but if when i have more control and get better results i usually end up using a dedicated software like tldf to create it i hope this video allowed you to understand how to create timelapses of the stars and if you want to learn more about astrophotography go check out my other videos on the subject or subscribe to learn about how to use your phone and the dji osmo pocket to capture the stars if you enjoyed the video also please leave a like below because it lets me know that you liked it and also leave a comment if you have any question on the subject see the next one bye you
Video Links
- 🔗 Capturing stars with your PHONE
- 🔗 Capturing stars your DSLR
- 🔗 Google Pixel 4a
- 🔗 Canon 6D Mk II
- 🔗 Canon 16-35mm Mk II f/2.8
- 🔗 Canon Intervalometer
- Creating startrails
- Capturing the stars with the DJI Pocket 2
- Creative techniques for video & photos
- Instagram: @loic.bellemare.alford ()
- My online store
- Affiliate link for Epidemic Sound
- https://kit.co/loic.bellemare.alford/youtube-gear
- DJI Pocket 2 Creator Combo
- 128 gb MicroSD card
- Canon 6D Mk
- Google Pixel 4a
- Canon ZOOM LENS EF24-105mm F4L IS II USM
- Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8 Lens
- Canon EF 70-200mm f/4.0L-IS II USM Lens
- VANGUARD VEO 2 265CB CARBON FIBER TRIPOD
- DJI MAVIC AIR
- http://bit.ly/loicba
What is this video about?
Creating an astro timelapse might seem intimidating at first, but it's actually quite straightforward once you understand the fundamentals. A timelapse is simply a series of photos played rapidly—at 24 frames per second for video, that means I need 24 photos for every second of footage. If I want a 10-second timelapse, I'm looking at 240 photos minimum. To figure out how many shots I'll actually need, I use an app like Photo Pills to calculate the exact event duration based on my shooting interval.
The most critical step is capturing sharp stars in every single frame. Since each photo becomes a frame in the final video, any blurry shots will make the entire timelapse look soft. Before you even start shooting, check out my dedicated videos on getting sharp stars with your DSLR or phone—those camera settings are essential and I don't repeat them here.
Once you're ready to shoot, you'll need an intervalometer to automate the process. On a Canon DSLR, there's a built-in interval timer in the menu, though it's a bit clunky to adjust mid-shoot. An external intervalometer is far more convenient—I can set the exposure time, interval, and total shot count all in one place, plus monitor my progress without touching the camera. If you're shooting on a phone like the Pixel 4a, apps like ProCam X let you set interval shooting with unlimited captures, giving you the flexibility to stop whenever you're ready.
After capturing all your shots, the post-processing happens in two stages. First, I edit the images in Lightroom using the same technique I'd apply to any starfield photo—adjusting exposure, contrast, saturation, adding a slight curves adjustment, bringing clarity way up, and removing chromatic aberration and light pollution. Then I sync those edits across every single image and export them as JPEGs.
For stitching the photos into a video, I have two options. Premiere Pro works fine if I'm already in a project and want something quick—I simply import the images as an image sequence, drag it to the timeline, and export. But for better control and results, I use dedicated timelapse software like TLDF, which offers powerful features like automatic flicker correction (useful for exposures that shift over time), noise reduction, and blending options. TLDF gives me a proper preview before rendering and outputs high-quality video in whatever format I choose.
Whether you're shooting with a phone or DSLR, the workflow is the same: nail your sharp stars, use an intervalometer to capture hundreds of frames, edit them consistently, and stitch them together. The result is a hypnotic video of the night sky that would be nearly impossible to shoot any other way.