time lapse basics?
Discussion
Evening / morning 
I've been fascinated with time lapse videos since watching the aston one posted here recently, and an opportunity has come up where I may have a valid reason to create one other than to satisfy my own curiosity.
Any pointers for a fairly noob photographer? I've got a wealth of lenses and a nikon SLR at my disposal, and have ordered a suction mount to play with on the car / bike. Pretty clueless otherwise tbh, but I've quite a bit of time to play with settings and stuff. I'm assuming it's better done with SLR as opposed to a decent video camera (told you I was a noob
)?
Also, what's the best way of putting all the shots together? I've been trying pretty hard to learn photoshop intensively and am definatily getting the hang of it, but only for image manipulation and making artwork / logos etc, nothing of this nature. I've got all the main adobe stuff, on both mac and windows to play with, though I've not scratched the surface of any of it just yet aside of PS.
Basically, a quick and dirty list of tips would be ace, or pointers to a decent guide for cretins / beginners like myself.
Muchos Gracias
I've been fascinated with time lapse videos since watching the aston one posted here recently, and an opportunity has come up where I may have a valid reason to create one other than to satisfy my own curiosity.
Any pointers for a fairly noob photographer? I've got a wealth of lenses and a nikon SLR at my disposal, and have ordered a suction mount to play with on the car / bike. Pretty clueless otherwise tbh, but I've quite a bit of time to play with settings and stuff. I'm assuming it's better done with SLR as opposed to a decent video camera (told you I was a noob
)?Also, what's the best way of putting all the shots together? I've been trying pretty hard to learn photoshop intensively and am definatily getting the hang of it, but only for image manipulation and making artwork / logos etc, nothing of this nature. I've got all the main adobe stuff, on both mac and windows to play with, though I've not scratched the surface of any of it just yet aside of PS.
Basically, a quick and dirty list of tips would be ace, or pointers to a decent guide for cretins / beginners like myself.
Muchos Gracias
Edited by Stu R on Thursday 25th June 02:22
I had a little play with timelapse stuff using a DSLR the other week to prepare for a project I'm doing . . . it's very simple.
If the camera has the ability to take images at intervals then set it up and let it do it's thing, I set the camera to full auto and to record in low res jpegs (which are still too high res for the video).
Once I had the images I resized them all to 640x480 pixels (in my case using imagemagik but anything that lets you do this in bulk would do) then fed them into VirtualDub, which then produced an .avi movie, job done . . . for upload to youtube or the like I then compressed this down to an H.264/AAC .mp4 movie which seems to work better . . . I didn't experiment with the audio side of things but I'm sure a video editing package would allow that very simply . . .
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nx4H-462oso
10 minutes work after the camera had done it's thing . . .
I guess you could use larger jpegs for an HD video too and imagemagick and virtualdub are free tools to do the job, there are others out there but I'm not familiar with them
Fd
Fd
If the camera has the ability to take images at intervals then set it up and let it do it's thing, I set the camera to full auto and to record in low res jpegs (which are still too high res for the video).
Once I had the images I resized them all to 640x480 pixels (in my case using imagemagik but anything that lets you do this in bulk would do) then fed them into VirtualDub, which then produced an .avi movie, job done . . . for upload to youtube or the like I then compressed this down to an H.264/AAC .mp4 movie which seems to work better . . . I didn't experiment with the audio side of things but I'm sure a video editing package would allow that very simply . . .
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nx4H-462oso
10 minutes work after the camera had done it's thing . . .
I guess you could use larger jpegs for an HD video too and imagemagick and virtualdub are free tools to do the job, there are others out there but I'm not familiar with them
Fd
Fd
You want the Nikon equivalent to one of these:
Timer Remote Controller TC-80N3
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Canon-TC-80N3-Camera-contr...
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/tc-80n3....
Timer Remote Controller TC-80N3
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Canon-TC-80N3-Camera-contr...
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/tc-80n3....
Just remember that the standard playback speed for video is 24 fps. If you use a still camera, and get it to take a picture every second, the slowest your time lapse video will play is 24x real time. This is OK for slow moving objects, like a flower opening or clouds drifting across the sky, but may be a little bit quick for something like a car.
If your camera will allow you to take shots at shorter intervals, you may want to experiment to see what gives the most pleasing effect. If it still all appears to be too quick, a video camera may be the way to go. I have a Sony that allows anything from 2x to 10x real time recording via time lapse. The other advantage of a video camera is that you don't need a software program to stitch all the still images together to make a movie.
If your camera will allow you to take shots at shorter intervals, you may want to experiment to see what gives the most pleasing effect. If it still all appears to be too quick, a video camera may be the way to go. I have a Sony that allows anything from 2x to 10x real time recording via time lapse. The other advantage of a video camera is that you don't need a software program to stitch all the still images together to make a movie.
I've had a couple of cracks at this. As Ferg says it can be pretty straightfoward.
1. Does your camera have an interval timer already built in? Nikon speak is intervalometer. Definitley in the Pro level bodies and also I recall in the D200/300 as well
2. As I was doing static scenes I set manual focus to avoid an issues with focus hunting
3. Aperture priority and juggle the apperture setting to get a nice long exposure. From reading around the net it seems that the smoothest flow of objects through your frames comes from having the longest exposure with the shortest time between frames, so a 1 second exposure every 5 seconds gives a more jerky flow of objects across the scene than a four second exposure every 5 seconds. Mind you don't run into issues with clearing out the memory buffer to a card by having nice big acrd and as Ferg says use a small file size to save at. If you're doing this in the car you may have to juggle exposure to make the frames sharper.
4. Make sure the card has enough space for your images
5. Start intervalometer and sit back
6. If using the Mac I've found Quicktime Pro does a great job, just store your timelapse images in a folder and then use the command Import image sequence (files ahve to be sequentially numbered), click on the first image and select the number of frames per second and then Quicktime doe sit all for you.
So making basic ones is easy
Chris
1. Does your camera have an interval timer already built in? Nikon speak is intervalometer. Definitley in the Pro level bodies and also I recall in the D200/300 as well
2. As I was doing static scenes I set manual focus to avoid an issues with focus hunting
3. Aperture priority and juggle the apperture setting to get a nice long exposure. From reading around the net it seems that the smoothest flow of objects through your frames comes from having the longest exposure with the shortest time between frames, so a 1 second exposure every 5 seconds gives a more jerky flow of objects across the scene than a four second exposure every 5 seconds. Mind you don't run into issues with clearing out the memory buffer to a card by having nice big acrd and as Ferg says use a small file size to save at. If you're doing this in the car you may have to juggle exposure to make the frames sharper.
4. Make sure the card has enough space for your images
5. Start intervalometer and sit back
6. If using the Mac I've found Quicktime Pro does a great job, just store your timelapse images in a folder and then use the command Import image sequence (files ahve to be sequentially numbered), click on the first image and select the number of frames per second and then Quicktime doe sit all for you.
So making basic ones is easy
Chris
GetCarter said:
theboyfold said:
Is there any way of doing this with the Nikon D80, as it doesn't have the same features as the higher end cameras...
On my Nikon cameras it's called interval timer... just make sure it's not in the manual - it might be hiding in a sub menu somewhere (or not)Nurburgsingh said:
um... being completly stoopid when it comes to these things, could you expand on that a bit?
The software that came with your camera (you know that disk that you put in the cupboard).Install - EOS Utility from the disk and Digital Photo Professional and specify within DPP where you want the files to be stored.
Run EOS Utility
Connect your Camera..and turn it on.
The options will then become available.
Select Camera settings and Remote Shooting and another box will pop up.
You can change the setting of the camera from this window - e.g. speed / aperture etc..
Click the Clock Icon in the middle of the window.
Delay timer sets the time to start the shooting.
Interval does what it says on the tin - interval between shots.
Enter an amount of shots you want to take.
Click Start
Shots will be taken, downloaded to DPP and bob's your uncle.
Make sense ?
(Some) Canon cameras support remote capture, which means you can connect them via USB to a PC or Laptop and control the camera from the computer, either storing the photos on the camera card, or directly on the PC. Storing on the laptop obviously has the benefit that you can take a lot more photos before you run out of memory. Canon provide this facility in both point and shoot and DSLR models.
You only need to shoot at 1280 x 768 to be 'filming' at HD quality, so no need for higher resolutions as others have pointed out.
Putting the photos together is very easy with VirtuaDub, which is free and quite easy to use once you've worked it out. It has 'filters' which allow you to resize, crop, rotate or flip the images as well as doing brightness/contrast fixes, add motion blur and temporal chroma smoothing. That last one is quite important as you'll find that the scene brightness can change a lot between frames, either just due to slight differences in exposure, or in worst conditions due to scattered clouds on a sunny day which can bounce the brightness all over the place. If you don't smooth it, you can find the video flickers wildly and can be almost unwatchable. You can save processing settings (a set of filters and their configuration) so that you can apply them to all the films that you make and get consistent output.
Films get big quickly. At 1 photo every 10 seconds, you can get more than 4,000 photos in a day, which amounts to a couple of gigabytes at conservative settings. Initial processing into AVI will explode that size - 2 gigs worth of photos can become 10 gigs worth of film. Sort out the compression settings and you can reign things in again.
I'm currently 'filming' our self-build this way. No video of the build itself yet, but here's a test of the equipment (a cheap canon point and shoot bought off ebay). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5EEZnTOup8. I'm using a cheap camera here because it's got to live outside in a small weather proof enclosure for six months or so and I didn't want to commit to using a DSLR for that length of time.
You only need to shoot at 1280 x 768 to be 'filming' at HD quality, so no need for higher resolutions as others have pointed out.
Putting the photos together is very easy with VirtuaDub, which is free and quite easy to use once you've worked it out. It has 'filters' which allow you to resize, crop, rotate or flip the images as well as doing brightness/contrast fixes, add motion blur and temporal chroma smoothing. That last one is quite important as you'll find that the scene brightness can change a lot between frames, either just due to slight differences in exposure, or in worst conditions due to scattered clouds on a sunny day which can bounce the brightness all over the place. If you don't smooth it, you can find the video flickers wildly and can be almost unwatchable. You can save processing settings (a set of filters and their configuration) so that you can apply them to all the films that you make and get consistent output.
Films get big quickly. At 1 photo every 10 seconds, you can get more than 4,000 photos in a day, which amounts to a couple of gigabytes at conservative settings. Initial processing into AVI will explode that size - 2 gigs worth of photos can become 10 gigs worth of film. Sort out the compression settings and you can reign things in again.
I'm currently 'filming' our self-build this way. No video of the build itself yet, but here's a test of the equipment (a cheap canon point and shoot bought off ebay). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5EEZnTOup8. I'm using a cheap camera here because it's got to live outside in a small weather proof enclosure for six months or so and I didn't want to commit to using a DSLR for that length of time.
Wow, thanks for all the replies folks!
I'm using a Nikon D300 which does indeed have the interval shooting
I've been playing around with the camera and managed to get some half decent results, which is really surprising, nothing interesting, just messing about trying to get the hang of it. Virtual Dub seems pretty intuitive too. Some bloody good tips here, much appreciated as I'd never have known what to do without them, but the more I'm messing about with the camera the more I'm picking up.
A whole new world of messing around awaits Going to play some more over the weekend if the weather holds up and see if I can do something funky with it, I love the post editing options that emerge, but having to do so many frames one by one is really tedious 
I'm using a Nikon D300 which does indeed have the interval shooting
I've been playing around with the camera and managed to get some half decent results, which is really surprising, nothing interesting, just messing about trying to get the hang of it. Virtual Dub seems pretty intuitive too. Some bloody good tips here, much appreciated as I'd never have known what to do without them, but the more I'm messing about with the camera the more I'm picking up.
A whole new world of messing around awaits
Going to play some more over the weekend if the weather holds up and see if I can do something funky with it, I love the post editing options that emerge, but having to do so many frames one by one is really tedious Found some more good time lapse movies:
http://blog.ginkgostudios.com/2008/10/tiltshift-mo...
I'm going to have a play around when my body gets back from the fixit blokes. I never had a laptop that had firewire, so never tried remote shooting before on my DSLR body.
http://blog.ginkgostudios.com/2008/10/tiltshift-mo...
I'm going to have a play around when my body gets back from the fixit blokes. I never had a laptop that had firewire, so never tried remote shooting before on my DSLR body.
Andy M said:
Very useful, going to give it a try Finally got round to processing my try from a week or so ago. Coping with large shifts in exposure seems to be a bit of an issue and I'm having trouble getting rid of the flickering which Quick Time does not appear to be able to get rid of. For some reason it looks a lot worse here than when played back in QuickTime on my machine.
Chris
Clicky here
Chris
Clicky here
CVP said:
Finally got round to processing my try from a week or so ago. Coping with large shifts in exposure seems to be a bit of an issue and I'm having trouble getting rid of the flickering which Quick Time does not appear to be able to get rid of. For some reason it looks a lot worse here than when played back in QuickTime on my machine.
Chris
Clicky here
What was time interval between each frame?Chris
Clicky here
The light level on some of the buildings are constant (white building on the left, and the building with lights on in the centre), but the sky changes quite a bit. Changing the metering might help.
I'm going to try out the same thing soon, and I am sure will hit the same problem!
smack said:
What was time interval between each frame?
The light level on some of the buildings are constant (white building on the left, and the building with lights on in the centre), but the sky changes quite a bit. Changing the metering might help.
I'm going to try out the same thing soon, and I am sure will hit the same problem!
I've been experimenting with intervals of between 5 seconds and 10 seconds between frames and also the frame playback between 15 and 25 frames per second inthe final movie. I try to get as small as possible time between the shutter clsoing and the next frame starting to be exposed to try and get a decent flow through of things that move int he image e.g. car lights, boats etc. The light level on some of the buildings are constant (white building on the left, and the building with lights on in the centre), but the sky changes quite a bit. Changing the metering might help.
I'm going to try out the same thing soon, and I am sure will hit the same problem!
For this one I did it all in aperture priority mode, started at f16 or so and then as the light fell, slowly opened the aperture so as to maintain a 1-2 second exposure.
I do find that it is when the lighting changes most that I get issues. I have another one taken on a very overcast day and there is much less flicker there. That one was a Saturday mornign and it amazes me how much water traffic there is around lower Manhattan.
Had another go last night starting later and got a much better result. I think for the sky ones I'll try with a graduated neutral density filter to start with. Much more experimentation to be done here I feel, it's really quite fascinating.
The only peverse thing I'm finding is that the best software (read not too expensive) for de-flickering is Windows, and only a couple of months ago I made the move to Mac...
Chris
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