Timelapses & Still Shots from SPSP 2012 *ADDED northern side of the field*

[multiweb]

I got through most of the subs I shot at this star party. I travelled light and didn't have a mount or scope with me. Just the NEX-5. And I even forgot the tripod so it was on ground level. :P

There are high resolutions of those pics and more on the following links:

Star Trails (https://skydrive.live.com/?cid=6930D3AD12D5044C&id=6930D3AD12D5044C%21863#cid=6930D 3AD12D5044C&id=6930D3AD12D5044C%211185)

Sunsets (https://skydrive.live.com/?cid=6930D3AD12D5044C&id=6930D3AD12D5044C%21863#cid=6930D 3AD12D5044C&id=6930D3AD12D5044C%211190)

Two timelapse (also available in HD -1080)

Thursday here (http://vimeo.com/40984927)

Friday here (http://vimeo.com/41053135)

As you can see the nights were relatively clear Thursday and Friday but Saturday was the best of the three.

More to come later on. Enjoy. :)

[alexch]

Niice! You are getting some excellent colours in star trails.

[RobF]

Great shots Marc. No dewing problems sitting on the ground?

[DavidTrap]

Impressive stuff Marc!

Love the dawn light.

DT

[Phil Hart]

nice effort marc.. you can still have a lot fun without a telescope eh? :thumbsup: i also like the sunrise sequence over the grass and tents.. very nice light and colour. and the low angle (no tripod!?) actually looks really nice.

was your white balance fixed or on auto? there's a fair bit of variation in the night sky background colour which could be airglow but seems to change a bit more than i would expect for that?

cheers
phil

[RichardJ]

Hi Marc,

Well done!! I love watching your timelapse compilations.

regards,

RichardJ

[multiweb]

Thanks a lot Alex. :thumbsup: Yeah I got that sorted out now. First ones I did were all white. Shooting in RAW now helped heaps. :)


Thanks Rob. :thumbsup: Still got wet but not the lens. I had it in a thick sock and the camera was under a camping chair left on the field so nobody would drive or walk over it and that shielded it from the night sky too. Not ideal but it worked to some extent. You can see the camera move at times and I think it's the plastic 'ball' tripod that expands and contracts with the heat when it's exposed to the sun.


Thanks David. :thumbsup: Dawn & Dusk are my favourite times of the day. Always changing colors.


Thanks a lot Richard. Glad you've enjoyed them.:thumbsup:

[Dennis]

Lovely work Marc – thanks for the views, they really convey the atmosphere and goings on of a star party. Nice ground-based perspective too!

Cheers

Dennis

[FlashDrive]

Very nice photos and time lapse is just great.

Flash :hi:

[multiweb]

Thanks for commenting Phil. I was hoping you'd pick up on this post as I need some (a lot of) help. :thumbsup: I read your book cover to cover a couple of times but couldn't find much in term of processing.

As you've picked up there are still a lot of things wrong with my processing. Noise, green cast and color balance issues.

My white balance is set and fixed to Daylight. ISO3200 15s subs. I shoot in RAW full frame. Color Space AdobeRGB (not sRGB). There are only two modes.

I use Adobe Lightroom 4 (LR4) and LR Timelapse (LRT). I have posted in the bug report section of the LRT forums but the bloke is on holydays at the moment so I'll wait.

I adjust the colors in LR4 .It uses Camera raw 7. I had to use the temperature, tint, shadows, exposure sliders to tweak the histogram. It is not ideal but these are the only parameters that are successfuly saved to the XMP files and read back by LRT.

The Tone curves (per R,G & B Channels) are not read back in LRT so it doesn't work when I interpolate and create all the keyframes in LRT. The issue being that even if you increase the frame density the color balance does change during the night and the histogram 'flickers' blue/green/red in between so you see that change of colors from one frame to the other. Could also be background color noise which I haven't taken care of.

So that's what I'm still to work out. Green cast and proper color balance. Do you use LR4/LRT? I have CS6 on pre-order coming mid-may or about. I'm hoping Bridge CS6 will have he functionality to Tone Curve individual Channels. CS5.5 doesn't do it at this stage.

If you have an easy solution or how to I'd love to hear about it. :thumbsup:

[multiweb]

Thanks Dennis. :thumbsup: It was a great SPSP. The best I've been to to date and it was really unexpected given the weather forecast. I think most people who went there didn't expect too much and everybody was stocked when the skies opened up 3 consecutive nights. Saturday was freaky. Warm night, good seeing, no wind, super transparency. It just didn't make sense to get it all together . When it's hot or not windy it's usually very wet.

All the guys at the house were guiding sub arc-second on galaxies and I suspect there are going to be some cracker shots in these forums very soon.


Thanks Flash. :thumbsup:Glad you've enjoyed them.

[Tom Davis]

Great shots, Marc!!

-Tom

[multiweb]

Thank you Tom. :thumbsup:

[Phil Hart]

jeepers.. you've gone *way* past beginner processing of timelapse! most of the content of my book was written second half of last year and i hadn't even tried LR Timelapse then so was in no position to write about it! have you seen gunther wegner's book as well? probably still doesn't answer your question.

my processing is *much* simpler than yours.. so either the colour issues are there in your files to begin with or all your complicated processing has introduced it. next time you could shoot raw+jpg and see if the colour flicker is there in a jpg sequence. or just export a simple sequence from the RAW files with no tampering of colour at all and see how that looks?

daylight white balance should be fine.. that's what i generally use for the dark part of the sequence. i don't do any tweaking over time of white balance/tint/colour tone curves outside twilight. just one setting kept constant throughout dark part of night.

i dare say the sequence is a little underexposed which probably exacerbates the problem.. lots of colour in the shadow noise. try 30 second frames.. (or a faster lens :-).

could try desaturating a little, apply colour noise reduction.. hmm.. i'm just about out of ideas. i think the small sensor and pixels in your nex5 are probably your biggest limitation at this point. i don't think your processing skills need any more help!

[edit.. nex5 pixels look similar size to other cropped sensor dslrs.. but still looks a bit like a sensor performance issue to me..]

cheers
phil

[Paul Haese]

Time lapse videos are quite nice. I would have gone the poles though. :)

[multiweb]

Thanks Paul. I had done the SCP previously the month before the star party: here (http://vimeo.com/39459117)and here (http://vimeo.com/39449942).

[multiweb]

Thanks heaps mate for taking the time to listen and respond to my rambling. Here's some more ;)


I haven't read Gunther ebook yet. Will do that next. I have been logging the changes in XMP files with windiff between saving them from LRT and LR4 and vice versa. It's a bit of a mess at the moment. Obvious version conflicts, etc... I think LR3/CRW6 was stable but LR4/CRW7 are using new processes and LRT doesn't read all of them (yet?). Well it does read the XMP file but the interface doesn't translate it to a usable information so I think the parameters mapping between old and new (2012) may be a little buggy still. Or I am doing things totally wrong. I haven't got much feedback from their forum yet but for the usual 'it's working for me'. There are heaps of posts about metadata issues between LRT and lightroom though.



The colour flickering is not in the unprocessed RAWS so it is definitely introduced by my processing. Modifying the temperature/exposure sliders even in small increments has a huge impact on the white balance in the histogram from frame to frame. Too much leverage for lack of a better word.
Tone Curve mapping would be more precise on selected keyframes but they just don't pass on to LRT. I can't get them to work anyway. I can see the XMP files loaded back in LRT. Each tone curve (R,G & B) creates an array that is populated with pairs of coordinates (X,Y) that represent each control point on the curve From 0 to 255 on both axis, so minimum of two points (black point and white point) with anything in between. These appear as extra lines in the XMP files within each channel. XMP files are similar to a XML format. But LRT interface columns still reflect what I assume is the old parametric system (as per CRW5 and CRW6): Highlights, Lights, Darks & Shadows sliders in tone curve. No channel separation.

The only few times I shot nightsky stills in JPEG were shocking. Black clipping and under exposed shots. Data that I couldn't recover so I gave up on that real fast. Will try to not color correct a short sequence and see what happens. My last resort would be to batch all the TIFF in PS and run action to get rid of the noise and green cast but it's another step and a lot of big files to handle. Ultimately it might be the solution to not let LRT interpolate colors, just exposure and do the histogram in PS as a final batch. My processing flow needs to be reversed there. :question:


Yes daylight white balance was recommended for night as well. I couldn't keep it constant through the night sequence though as I was trying to get rid of that green cast.


Yes it is. Trying to hide all the ugly bits. ;) The lens is 25-18mm. I'm looking for a 12mm or 16mm. I think Alex has a 12mm pancake lens on his. It would certainly make the field more interesting as it gets a bit monotonous in parts.


I did push the saturation a little yeah. When I watch the 1080 on my HD TV I went wow! Rio carnival! Too much colors :lol: Maybe I'll calibrate my new PC monitor. I haven't done that yet. Noise is another thing that I haven't approached yet. I'll do it when I have the colours sorted out. Baby steps.

I do need help. If I don't make notes of what I'm doing I forget. :P


Could be too. After all it's not a high end. Just having fun with it. :)
Alex got his camera spectrum modified so I thik it's more sensitive to red. If I can get these greens down post process and stop the color shifts I'll be a happy camper.

[jjjnettie]

:D I really enjoyed the views, thanks.

[multiweb]

No worries - thank JJJ. :thumbsup:

[DavidTrap]

Marc

I was just playing with LRTimelapse today and LightRoom 4.1(RC). The biggest thing I noticed was that LRT forces LR to use the older develop sliders. It still worked OK (to my unexperienced eyes!)

DT

[multiweb]

Not necessarily. You can force it to use the new settings but you are right in saying that it will use the old ones by default. Then LR4 will detect it in the XMP files and behave like LR3.

In LRT go to Edit>Settings. Select LR4 in the process version then OK. Load all your subs. When it's done press CTRL+A to select all then CTRL+I to initialise all the XMP files. Open Lightroom 4, load all the metadata from the new files and you'll be using the 2012 sliders.

[DavidTrap]

Thanks Marc.

Always a challenge to find one's way around software with limited manuals...

DT

[Octane]

They were very enjoyable to watch, Marc!

H

[multiweb]

Have you registered to the forums. There's a lot of info but you have to dig it out.


Thanks H. :thumbsup:

[DavidTrap]

Haven't registered there yet. Need to get some good sequences to process - bring on some cool, crisp winter nights!!!!

DT

[multiweb]

Just added the last animation that spans across Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning.

Northern side (http://vimeo.com/41143152)of the field and correponding star trail and sunrise:

Star Trail North (https://skydrive.live.com/?cid=6930D3AD12D5044C&id=6930D3AD12D5044C%21863#cid=6930D 3AD12D5044C&id=6930D3AD12D5044C%211192)

Sunrise North (https://skydrive.live.com/?cid=6930D3AD12D5044C&id=6930D3AD12D5044C%21863#cid=6930D 3AD12D5044C&id=6930D3AD12D5044C%211191).

In this one you can see Fred V. 's motion trolley in action and the secret to good motion time lapse: 1 can of Guiness and a pack of 20. :P

I have now upgraded the HD versions to 1920x1080 for those who have a fast desktop PC. SD remains for fast web loading but the higher res is available for download and will play on a HD TV.

[Ross G]

Hi Marc,

Great photos and excellent timelapses.

Your star trails are amazing.


Thanks.

Ross.

[iceman]

Marc I'm not sure what codec you used and I'm not sure if it's my problem or other people see it too, but i'm getting horrible blocky compression on the timelapses at Vimeo.

I've only ever had this problem before when Phil uploaded his videos to SmugMug, but never had the problem on Vimeo.

It could be my problem since rebuilding my laptop. What codec did you use?

[iceman]

Interestingly, if I turn HD off, the problem goes away on vimeo!! :shrug:

[multiweb]

Thanks a lot Ross. :thumbsup:

[multiweb]

It might be related to the re-encoding on Vimeo side. I upload at 1080p [1920x1080] H.264 Then vimeo does its thing for SD and HD at 720p. Check this one (http://vimeo.com/39459117)and see if it's blocky for you. That's lower res.

If it's playing ok then it means the 1920x1080 HD has streaming problems and won't work on all target computers. I'll keep that in mind in the future.