OT: My summer 2009 time lapse reel

[Tremont]

http://www.vimeo.com/6601409

Various time lapses I did in California over the summer. The lenses used, in no particular order (most of these were rented):

Canon 50mm f1.4 (the majority of shots)
Canon 200mm f2.8L (+1.4 extender)
Canon 400mm f5.6L (+2x extender)
Canon 85mm f1.2L (used for the GG bridge shot with the bubbly water and SFO shots, my favorite lens)
Canon 24mm f1.4L (half dome shot, cropped a lil)
Sigma 12-24mm (second most used, look for the somewhat distorted shots)

 

[Recty]

You big tease!!!

 

[TitusvileSurfer]

All of your segments are masterfully crafted, all of your subjects are engaging and interesting, some qualify in the ranks of top clips I have ever seen.
The clouds are breathtaking. I've never seen clouds like that in my life! I also don't have hills which is kind of a requirement.
I really love the airplanes landing!!

 

[Recty]

I really like the work, very very nice.

Maybe I dont understand something here, so please explain it to me

Wouldn't it be easier to take HD video and just speed that up, rather than take a bunch of shots and stick them together?

I've always liked time lapse "stuff" but it seems to me that it would just be easier to do it with a speeded up video. Nowadays you can get 1920x1080 resolution pretty cheaply and record right to a laptop, which should mean you could record for hours, then just speed it up double time, or quadruple time, or whatever you want.

I got my remote for doing time lapse with eventually, but the more I look at it, I dont know if it's worth wearing out my shutter 2-3000 times per shoot for something I could do with a video camera. Please, convince me!

 

[Recty]

Wow, at 3:40 or so with the airplanes, that is just awesome.

 

[Tremont]

Without something like a RED camera or film, you can't get nearly the quality of time lapse that you can get with a DSLR using stills.

If you look at the bandwidth alone of shooting stills, the sheer amount of information that you are pulling in is pretty ridiculous. Let's say I'm aiming for playback at 25 fps and shooting full resolution RAW on a 5dmarkii:

41.8 MBx25 == ~1 GB/s video source

With video, you are at a much much lower bandwidth and the image information (like white balance) is being baked in at 1080p.

With stills - and shooting RAW, you can do a huge amount of post processing at high resolution, motion stabilization, noise reduction, spot removal...you don't resize down to 1080p until the last step.

It's akin to the difference between shooting stills with RAW versus the lowest resolution possible jpeg setting with a few extra problems thrown in.

 

[Tremont]

Also regarding your shutter. Yeah. That's a big problem.

I burned out my XSI shutter while it was still under warranty and they fixed it.

My 5Dmkii is a trooper and has vastly exceeded it's estimated shutter life. I hope it goes out soon so I get it under warranty!!, otherwise I'm not sure what it costs to repair, I know older Canons were like $300 to repair/replace the shutter mechanisms.

 

[IPT]

amazing. You have nailed this for sure. At what interval are you taking the frames? Is there free software to edit it?

 

[Tremont]

My frame interval varies a lot. Often I can't shoot as fast as I want. Other times I shorten it down in post. I don't think any exceed more than 10 seconds per frame for this type of stuff.

There is free software - I did all of my coral movies shooting jpeg mode and making into clips with virtualdub. There are some free video editing suites out there but I have never tried them (I use Sony vegas to edit clips together).

I shoot everything RAW now and use After Effects, which is expensive, but an incredibly powerful/productive tool for time lapse. You can keep all of your source data in tact as RAW and it doesn't feel like a one way process like virtualdub. AE saves all your post processing settings for every clip and at any point you can go back and change things like color temperature on RAW import (on top of that AE has some very powerful features like image stabilization that you will use over and over again for time lapse).

 

[Juggler]

I really enjoyed that! Gonna be late for class though!

 

[Reef Bass]

Great job Ben! I particularly like the jets landing at SFO, the fog rolling in under moonlight, and the giant eddy formed by the tide coming into the bay under the Golden Gate. It was also fun to recognize the areas shown.

 

[rydr119]

Awesome work. I loved the clouds and the seals lol

 

[rbaker]

Well done. :thumbsup: The planes landing was a really cool idea...

 

[Mchava]

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW! Such awesome work, now I just need to get my butt in gear and do the same. Any tips you can give me?

 

[IPT]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=15709181#post15709181 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by Tremont
My frame interval varies a lot. Often I can't shoot as fast as I want. Other times I shorten it down in post. I don't think any exceed more than 10 seconds per frame for this type of stuff.

Okay, a little more specific (please). 10sec a frame? You mean 10 second exposures..or an exposure every 10 seconds?

How many actual images do you take for say a one minute clip?

 

[Tremont]

Interval == time between shots

The exposure is always less than the interval.

Here's an example:

Let's say I'm shooting some cars on the freeway. I want them to look like #$@*'ing lasers (like the lasers at 3:00 in the reel). To make cars look like lasers you need to keep your interval very short and set an exposure time that is as close to your interval as you can get. So I shoot 1.6 sec exposure @ 2 second interval. I shoot 250 frames like this (takes 8.3 minutes). I create a video out of said frames that plays back at 25 frames per second and is 10 seconds long.

But, every shot is different. Night shots, like Milky Way/star shots require a longer exposure time, so your interval has to be longer too. You end up with 10 or 20 or 30 second exposures so you set your interval to 11, 21, 31 seconds, etc... Sometimes I don't want a long exposure just because I want everything to be sharp without motion blur.

I put several of my day-to-night type clips in there as well (see the bay bridge/city shot midway through). These were done using a simple intervalometer that I built that is capable of ramping the exposure time (via bulb mode) so I could try to chase the exposure as the sun went down (Av Mode for this purpose generates very flickery results).

 

[Reef Bass]

I did enjoy the day to night clips and didn't stop to consider the change in exposure that occurred during them. Very well done.

 

[IPT]

thanks Ben

 

[IPT]

wow, weird. I had the "windows movie maker" so I dabbled. I just took 60 frames as the sun set out my window. It is supossedly running at 30FPS but I get like a 5 min video! No idea how that is happening. I took a frame every 30 seconds and the clouds were moving slow. Still I can tell it is too long of an anterval and yet this "video" crawls. I can see each frame seems to me to be paused 8-10 seconds. Got a lot to learn but it looks like it will be worth it.

 

[Recty]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=15720612#post15720612 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by Tremont
I put several of my day-to-night type clips in there as well (see the bay bridge/city shot midway through). These were done using a simple intervalometer that I built that is capable of ramping the exposure time (via bulb mode) so I could try to chase the exposure as the sun went down (Av Mode for this purpose generates very flickery results).

I wondered how you did that. I showed your video to some of the guys at work then was trying to explain to them what you did and I realized I had no idea how you would adjust for exposure as the night approached.