Hello. I am currently working on an aurora timelapse but am struggling to make it look real time. The motion is alot faster than real time when I use 24 fps. Slowing down in premier pro makes it look choppy. I have seen a couple of youtube timelapses of the aurora and some of them have much slower motion than mine but still smooth. Does anyone have any tips for me? I am working in both AE and premier pro.

Erik

The Aurora I have seen usually moves very slowly - but one night I saw a particularly good show over the Atlantic, one long wavy bit was almost stationary and the piece next to it was moving very very fast indeed, it was almost like a strobe light it moved so fast. That is real time of course by just looking, so Aurora do move at different speeds. It is possible that the time lapse film you saw was moving at a different real time speed to the one you photographed.

Generally for slower timelapse motion, you need to shoot frames more frequently. What interval were you using? That's what ultimately determines how fast the motion will appear at 24 fps playback speed.

You can try enabling frame-blending when you slow your clip down in AE, that might help. Otherwise next time you'll need to shoot with a shorter interval to get slower playback speed.

When I was shooting the Northern Lights I tried to keep the intervals between shots <2sec, most of the time 1sec. Meaning continuous shooting and exposure time of 1s or 2s. Depending on your camera/lens you might be able to have a lower exposure time too.
Even having 1s intervals means you are still speeding up the Aurora 24 times in the end...
Otherwise get a Sony A7s and shoot movies at 200k ISO

You can have a look at some of my Aurora footage (shot mostly at 1s intervals) here: