Hi! Welcome back to a new blog post! Today I want to show you how to smooth water when shooting a Timelapse without ND filters. 

When shooting a Timelapse of water with a fast shutter speed like a lake for example or the see, the result is pretty nasty.. everything looks very chaotic, so normally if you are able to shoot it with an ND filter you can smooth the water and make it more enjoyable. But If you didn’t have an ND or you couldn’t use one at that moment, here’s a good and quick trick to smooth out the water. 

So open your Timelapse on After Effects and create a composition, duplicate the Timelapse on your timeline 19 times, (depending on your Timelapse, you might need more or less layers, that’s up to you) start from the second line and move the clip one frame forward and so on until the last one.

Once you’ve done, select all the clip and go to the opacity, or type ’T’ the first layer remain at 100 the second at 50, then 33, 25, 20, 17, 14, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. 

Next step is to pre-compose your composition, then add the original on the timeline, get the Pen tool and draw a mask on the first layer over the water and vualà! the water is now smoother and more pleasant to watch! 

You can use this method pretty much all the time if there isn’t any object moving in the middle of the water, like a boat for example or a leaf, you’ll introduce a weird effect and it doesn’t look good.

I didn’t invent this tequnique, I first saw it explained by Preston Kanak, a great Timelapse and Filmmaker from the US back in 2016, I loved it and used on many occasion for my Timelapse. 

Check out Preston video, it’s pretty well made and there are few other tips to smooth clouds and people! 

I hope this short tutorial will help you for your next Timelapse, of course, if you have any question regarding this tutorial, feel free to ask me by leaving a comment below or through my social media.

Don't forget to say hi on my Instagram Account and subscribe to my YouTube channel!       

I'll see you in the next post! 

Thanks for reading!