How to align images to make timelapse video

You can use AE's tracker on an image sequence or on a pre-comp if you have imported the images and sequenced the layers. Sequencing layers is a slow and tedious way to turn stills into video. The success you will have tracking and stabilizing images depends on how bad the misalignment is.

Here are some other tricks that may help. First, export your image sequence to a size that fits your final project size using Lightroom. For example my primary still camera shoots 28 MP images. When I use that camera for time-lapse I establish a look in Lightroom by developing the "key" image in the sequence, sync all the other images, and then if I'm planning a standard HD project and I want to move around on the video a bit in post I'll use lightroom to export 16 bit tiff images that are 4000 pixels wide. Second tip: import your images as an image sequence and then set the frame rate interpretation in your NLE or in AE to match the frame rate of your intended project. Most of my comps are 29.97 fps because I live in NTSC land and a lot of my work goes to broadcast and 29.97 gives you more choices and less problems with moving graphics or embedded CGI than lower frame rates.

If you have alignment problems with the entire sequence then you can usually fix those easily even if you used motion control to move the camera during filming using AE's built in tracker by selecting Stabilize and choosing Rotation and Scale. As long as the image sequence is a little bigger than your final format you should be able to avoid the problem of edges coming into the final frame.

If you only have alignment problems for a few frames then you can use Photoshop to line up those frames using Photoshop's automatic alignment tools by importing the misaligned shots as layers and lining them up the same way you line up group shots so you can easily replace faces. There are a bunch of tutorials on this. Then the PSD can be imported into AE as a composition and the layers trimmed to one frame and sequenced. The finished comp can be cut into the good part of the sequence to fix the bad frames.

I hope some of these suggestions help. Time-lapse with digital cameras can much more difficult to get right than time-lapse with film cameras ever was because many digital cameras, even in the manual mode, will try and compensate for changing lighting conditions and cause flicker. Image stabilization systems can foul up alignment if the camera moves or even if the wind is blowing.

Camera movement between shots causes the object to be in a slightly different spot in each shot