Time Lapse

[Ryan McGinnis]

I made my first real attempt at shooting a time-lapse the past couple days at the Nebraska State Fair. I was wondering -- what tips and tricks do some of the more experienced time lapse shooters here at Stormtrack have, especially for shooting storms? What's the best shooting speed -- 1 shot per second? 2? More? Less? Do you use aperture priority to control for changes in ambient lighting as a storm moves in, or do you lock it down on manual? Or do you shoot your time lapse with a video camera (I'm trying to do with with a DSLR). Any tips are welcome, as the next storm season will be my first chance to really give storm time lapse a go.

 

[Skip Talbot]

I've been using a video camera to do timelapses, but was planning on using my DSLR this coming season. I've been doing most of my shots at 16x, which is just over a half second per frame at the framerate I'm shooting at. This works well for structure. For a long lived, and slow moving tornado, 4x or about a frame every eighth second works well. Obviously you'll probably want to leave most of your tornado footage at normal speed, but if you've got 20 minutes of tripoded stovepipe from afar, that's going to be tough to sit and watch even if you love tornado video. The DSLR probably can't keep up with a framerate that fast though, or at least not for very long. I'd suggest varying the shooting speed depending on the situation, with a fast moving gust front and structure that's overhead at 0.5 - 1 seconds per frame (or as fast your DSLR can shoot continuously), other structure shots at 1 - 2 seconds per frame, and distant structure, slow moving clouds, and night timelapse at 2 - 5 seconds per frame. Those longer gaps will let you run longer exposures for low light timelapse shots too.

I was planning on shooting in manual too. I haven't done any experimenting yet, but I imagine there is going to be some flickering or at least uneven shifts in brightness if you let the camera pick the exposure length per frame. If you're shooting raw you'll have room to play with tweaking the brightness and doing some smooth transitions in post processing.

 

[Jim_Coons]

I've shot time lapse a few times with my dslr last year. You definitely want to use aperture priority to maintain a constant depth of field. Also, shooting jpeg at a lower resolution is probably a good idea too. Modern dslr's shoot at sizes much larger than 1920 x 1080, which is probably where your video will max out. Save your memory card and some rendering time later by shooting smaller images on the front end.

I typically use a one second (or greater) interval between frames. Honestly it depends on what you're shooting. One second between shots is good to catch a cumulonimbus pop. Just play with it a few times before you go out in the field to shoot anything important.

Hope this helps!

 

[Skip Talbot]

Also, shooting jpeg at a lower resolution is probably a good idea too. Modern dslr's shoot at sizes much larger than 1920 x 1080, which is probably where your video will max out. Save your memory card and some rendering time later by shooting smaller images on the front end.

Good points. On the other hand, if you shoot at a larger than HD resolution or full resolution, you have the flexibility to pan inside the frame of your timelapse, which adds an extra element of movement, or crop and straighten the video as well. You can also do some ridiculously high resolution video such as 4000 pixel horizontal resolution like the Red camera shoots. That will future proof your videos a little more for when HD is phased out well down the road.

Check out Stephen Locke's awesome timelapse where he pans inside his timelapse:
Watch video >

 

[Brett Nickeson]

If you have a scene where the lighting won't change dramatically, shoot manual. This will prevent the dreaded flicker effect you get when shooting Aperture Priority and your camera makes minute changes to exposure between frames. Sure, there are de-flicker tools such as D. Graft's de-flicker for VirtualDub or the MSU de-flicker tool, but these can only do so much. If you get an intervalometer, many can only only shoot in one second increments, so that dictates your quickest gap between shots. Usually one second works fine even for relatively fast moving clouds.

Also, shoot wider than you think you need to. Remember HD video is 16:9 and a digital sensor is 3:2 which means the top and/or bottom is going to have to be cut out. Also, as Skip mentioned above, if you shoot wider and at a higher resolution you can pan within your timelapse.

Finally, get the best tripod you can afford. I've seen a lot of your photos and I'm guessing you already know this but it's still important!

 

[Ryan McGinnis]

Thanks for the tips! What about video editing programs - I've heard good things about Sony Vegas (in terms of bang for buck) - or is there a better bang for the buck program out there to edit video? I like the idea of panning within the frame but don't currently know which programs are capable of doing that.

 

[Skip Talbot]

I've been using Vegas and I'm sure Premiere has as many features or more. For making timelapses out of video, both programs will blend the frames together as you compress the video in the timeline. It takes forever to render out long timelapses even on a quad core, but the results are super nice. The noise gets averaged out and the video is super sharp. Vegas has a few limitations that make speeding up video faster than 4x kind of a pain without jumping through some hoops, so if I do a faster timelapse I render it out twice for 16x or use Premiere for the initial pass without frame blending and then bring that back into Vegas for the second pass. If you can tolerate Adobe's interfaces, its probably better just to do the whole thing in Premiere though.

I haven't tried dropping in hundreds or thousands of 18 megapixel stills and rendering it out in Red camera resolution. I could see Vegas flaking out in the process. I have done a few thousand HD resolution stills and it works quite well. You just import the images as a still image sequence, set the frame rate, and the images show up on the timeline as a single video clip which you can edit to your heart's content.

 

[Tony Perkins]

It's much easier IMO to manipulate video for timelapses than it is still frames. The situations where I have used a DSLR, it's been for shots at night with lights/lightning/aurora. One thing to consider about resolution is if you need a frequent shots, you're at the mercy of your camera's save rate and memory card speed. I've had to ratchet down the resolution on my Nikons before because it backs up saving frames and eventually can't do less than a 5 seconds interval. The other thing is to give up RAW, as the JPG will save faster due to the size in my experience.

Those will only get better with time in that department. For me, daytime == video camera, night == DSLR.

 

[Ryan McGinnis]

Thanks for the tips! I like the idea of Adobe, just not sure if I can swallow the price just this second. Photoshop isn't half bad for the actual assembling of stills into a time lapse video (an entire two minute clip would probably only take a few hours to render out), it's just that Photoshop isn't (obviously) currently a good program for trying to do any kind of editing to a video that has been output already. And that's where I'm at at the moment -- trying to find something that lets me trim a little here and there and pan and zoom as I put seperate clips together. I might have to start putting pennies in my piggie-bank for Premiere, unless Elements will also do what I'm looking for.

For what it's worth, I recently found an amazing blog post from one of the guys who does the time lapse work for the BBC nature documentaries in which he spills some of his settings / secrets. This has been incredibly informative:

http://timothyallen.blogs.bbcearth.com/2009/02/24/time-lapse-photography/

 

[Jim_Coons]

Thanks for posting that Link! Great Info!!

 

[Skip Talbot]

That is a great read. I saw an example on a blog where they shot a timelapse sunset in aperture priority. The changing exposure time definitely caused an annoying flicker. Their exposures were too short as well, as the motion of moving objects through the frame did not look natural at all. Sunset time lapses seem like they would be a challenge, but I think you'd definitely want to shoot manual and make your exposures a little too bright to start with so they end just a little too dark at the end, and perhaps you can even them out in post processing using some sort of script.

I also poked around at how fast I can shoot on my Canon 60D. In order to shoot indefinitely, the buffer has to completely clear before the next frame. Shooting at full resolution raw, this is just under two seconds on my camera. Even dropping to some of the lower resolution raw modes, it takes over a second, so I'd probably want to shoot the middle resolution raw and keep the frame rate at one frame every two seconds. This is a 48x timelapse with 24 fps video, which is pretty fast. Maybe too fast for scenes with fast moving clouds, but that looks like its going to be about the best I can do with this camera. I'm shooting on a class 10 flash card. They make faster ones, but from what I've read online, they don't make too much of a difference. It might be a limitation in the camera hardware, and maybe some other models are faster. I think we'll probably have to wait for a USB 3.0 DSLR or use a video camera to get a more frames per second though.

 

[Skip Talbot]

Another issue that I'm reading about is the wear and tear that shooting time lapse puts on a DSLR. My 60D is rated for 100,000 shutter releases. That's a lot of shots, until you start using it for time lapse. Shooting at one frame every two seconds, you'll hit 100,000 frames after 55 hours of use. Compressing that into 24 fps video, you'll wind up with just 70 minutes of video. Burn out a several hundred dollar (or more) DSLR body for 70 minutes of footage? Yikes!

On the other hand, if you shoot an hour of time lapse on every chase, the camera should still last through two seasons, and you can buy a new body then or have the shutter fixed for a couple hundred. Some reported the shutter lasting way longer than the rated life (some less), and some that the camera was still under warranty so they could get it fixed for free. If you still want to use the DSLR for time lapse, it might be better to just use a cheaper body (maybe a used T2i for me) since you're not using the bells and whistles when shooting time lapse anyway.

 

[Dan Robinson]

Good point, Skip. Since the highest resolution you'd need HD video for is 1920x1080 (unless you do a ton of that fancy Ken Burns-like panning/zooming in post), you could probably get away with buying a much older lower-res Canon body (like a 20D) dirt-cheap and dedicate it to TL service. That way you could still use your lenses with it and not wear out your primary DSLR. Even a 20D will still give you enough res to do the panning and zooming tricks in post.

 

[Jim Bailey]

Everything you ever wanted to know about shooting time lapse can be found in the forums here:

http://timescapes.org/

JB

 

[Ryan McGinnis]

Good point, Skip. Since the highest resolution you'd need HD video for is 1920x1080 (unless you do a ton of that fancy Ken Burns-like panning/zooming in post), you could probably get away with buying a much older lower-res Canon body (like a 20D) dirt-cheap and dedicate it to TL service. That way you could still use your lenses with it and not wear out your primary DSLR. Even a 20D will still give you enough res to do the panning and zooming tricks in post.

The 20D is a great camera for timelapse, with the only limitation being that it can only shoot a maximum of one frame every two seconds in RAW mode. (In JPEG mode it probably can do one per second, though I haven't tested). I know my 50D can do one per second in sRAW mode. The 20D's resolution is actually darn near 4K -- meaning that you could output video files that would play great on the highest-end digital movie theater projectors if you wanted to. Not bad for a camera that cheap!

The timelapse that I linked at the beginning of the thread was shot with a 20D.