My first attempt at making a time-lapse video out of a sequence of photos was not too successful. I just could not make it go fast enough. After some poking around I found out there is a way though and would like to summarize it here for you.

I am not going to go into the photo prep detail at this point. I will just assume you have a folder full of preprocessed photos sized just right for your video. In my case, I was after an HD video thus batch sized all of my photos down to 1920x1080 to make a 1090p video. Just a quick note on that step, I'd recommend avoiding any sharpening that you may normally do, on top of the hopefully slow shutter you used to capture your photos. That will make your frame to frame transitions smoother.

Start by creating a new iMovie Project. I named mine "Birdsong Time Lapse", picked Widescreen 16:9 for aspect ratio, 30 fps - NTSC for frame rate. At the bottom, uncheck any automatic transitions. Click Create. There are multiple ways to get your photos into your project now based on your workflow. Here, I simply dragged and dropped them from Finder right into the project. Then you can Command-A select all of them and click the 'i' icon to open the Inspector. There, you can set the duration of each photo. To get the duration approximately in line with the selected 30 fps frame rate, I needed to enter 0.03 seconds. But what is it? iMovie won't let you go under 0.1s!

I really don't know if there's any technical reason for this but I doubt it. I think it is just their marketing trick to get you pay for full Quick Time, which is what all of the Apple pages I came across stated. Not so fast though!

The first change you can, but don't have to do is to change the display format of time information. Go to iMovie > Preferences and on the General Tab check Display time as HH:MM:SS:frames. Now, in theory, you should be able to say that each photo should last 1 frame and you'd be all set. Just be careful not to get confused. The frames are still separated by a colon, not a period or other mark, and thus you don't have a reminder of this format and the last number will always be frames.

Close the preferences and back to Inspector. Enter "0:01" and tab out. Look, it's changed to "0:05"! So again, Apple is preventing speed fast enough for a time lapse sequence. But I like this format anyway, it makes the next step feel more exact. Proceed with the "0:05" duration and go to Share > Export Movie. I picked the last option, HD 1080p.

Now, go back to Project Inspector and create a second project, all properties the same as the first. I named it "Birdsong Time Lapse 5x" this time. This time, the ".mov" file that was created in previous step can't be dragged and dropped. Go to File > Import > Movies. Select the video file from the previous step, pick an Event to place the video into, select Optimize VIdeo / Full - Original Size, and Copy Files. Now you can select the whole clip in the Event Browser and drag and drop to your Project. Hit Command-A to make sure the whole clip is selected in the Project Browser.

Now, open the Inspector again, select the Clip Tab. Now there is a speed option that you can set to 500%, thus getting from each photo lasting 5 frames down to 1. If the speed option is not active, you probably did not select the optimize option upon import. In that case, you will see Convert Entire Clip button next to speed. This will do the optimization after the fact.

And that's it! Just export your movie one more time and you've got yourself a time lapse out of iMovie without paying to Quick Time or other additional software. If you have other reasons to buy that additional SW, by all means, go for it. But if it is just due to the duration limitation of iMovie, this just might save you a fe bucks.

Have fun lapsing time!