Comet Panstarrs

[multiweb]

Here's my comet from tonight before it disappeared in the trees on its way to the northern hemisphere. Lucky break in the clouds. :)

SONY NEX-5 10s exposures tracked on Polarie. Stack of 153 subs then composited on one of them for clouds and tree line.

Bigger pic here (https://skydrive.live.com/?cid=6930D3AD12D5044C&id=6930D3AD12D5044C%21863#cid=6930D 3AD12D5044C&id=6930D3AD12D5044C%211339). Still to make the timelapse.

https://vimeo.com/61178391

[Octane]

Very painterly. Lovely work, Marc. :)

H

[multiweb]

Thanks mate. :thumbsup:

[SkyViking]

That's just gorgeous!

[iceman]

Lovely! The video is great!

[Larryp]

Great video:thumbsup:

[Deeno]

Excellent!

[JohnG]

Good stuff Mark :thumbsup:, excellent video.

Cheers

[multiweb]

Thanks a lot guys. :thumbsup: I'm really glad I managed to get a glimpse of it with the Sydney weather. I'll have to redo the video to slow down time on the last section when I did 10s subs. I used to know how to do timewarp and frame blending in AE. I forgot. :P This footage is already half the original speed.

[alexch]

Nice work, Marc!
Unusual but very cool perspective in the video with the stationary comet and moving landscape.

Cheers,
Alex

[multiweb]

Thanks Alex. :thumbsup: I had the polarie tracking with a 200mm lens because I wanted to be able to stack the subs as well and it was easier to manage them this way. It looks a bit like a bomb dropping doesn't it? :lol:

[RB]

Lovely work Marc, very nice video too !

[strongmanmike]

Great video Marc

Mike

[Phil Hart]

Well done on keeping a sequence going for the video. It's not easy to leave a camera alone to do its thing when you're photographing an event like this!

[gregbradley]

That's great work Marc.

Is this a Nex 5r with the Sony time lapse app?

Greg.

[h0ughy]

nice, very nice!! DID WELL WITH THE VIDEO

[peter_4059]

Outstanding - wish I could do that.

[multiweb]

Thanks a lot guys. :thumbsup:


Thanks Greg. It's just a NEX-5. Not the newer model. I do all my levels and color balance in LR timelapse and Adobe Lightroom back and forth. When I'm happy with the colors and transitions I export the whole sequence to 16bit TIFFs. I stack the TIFF I want to make the stills and the comet tail. Then I use Adobe After Effect and Premiere Pro to export all the stills sequence to Vimeo.

[ourkind]

Very nice shot Marc and the video is excellent, great capture! :thumbsup:

[multiweb]

Thanks Carlos. :thumbsup:

[tilbrook@rbe.ne]

Your video is delight to watch Marc!

Just beautiful.

If you don't mind me asking, how do you get the frames to run at that speed. I'm using windows movie maker and it will only do one sec intervals, makes the animation a bit clunky.

Cheers,

Justin.

[gregbradley]

Thanks for the explanation Marc. I checked out Adobe Premiere Pro but it was very expensive. I take it you use that software for other work?

Greg.

[multiweb]

Thanks Justin. :thumbsup: When you have a limited number of frames to play with you have no choice but doing something called time warping or time remapping and you need a software that can handle that. The idea is to stretch the time and interpolate in between the key frames so you get a blend happening. Like combing a histogram by stretching. You end up with gaps that you need to fill in. You can also encode to an interleaved format such as MPEG to make playback smoother or use frame blending in the output format.

I added a snapshot of time remapping curve below. A straight line (constant slope) would be x1 speed. Any zero slope is a freeze frame. Negative slope is reverse playback. You define points that are keyframes in time and tweak the bezier handles to make a smooth transition. So in this case you have a freeze frame ramping up to x1 speed then it slows down at 3s then slightly slows to finish just before 10s.


Thanks Greg. :thumbsup: Yes Adobe products are not cheap to get in but once you're in a subscription model they are very cheap. I usually spend between $500 and $600 per year for the whole Adobe suite. That's every single Adobe product. But I have been with the program since the mid 90s when they started on MACs and used them at work for the past 15yrs or so.

[Ross G]

A beautiful comet photo Marc

Great video also.

Thanks.

Ross.

[multiweb]

Thanks Ross. :thumbsup: