Quote:
Originally Posted by philiphart
i've said as much to colin in email and another thread, but will add my high praise for this work here too. all the sequences are beautifully crafted, amazingly sharp and well executed. 
and the five camera system produces something incredible.. if anybody else in the world is doing it i haven't seen it.
Phil |
Thanks Phil, appreciate the kind words. I should probably have added you in the credits. It was one of your bioluminescence images that convinced me to switch to digital and do nightscapes!
Quote:
Originally Posted by gregbradley
Hi Colin,
I am about to start taking my first time lapses and I have talked to a few of the top guys already.
When you said you did multi day 12 day day/night time lapse is that with one camera? Wouldn't the memory cards fill up way before that?
You must have used a plug in power supply?
What sort of settings do you recommend?
I am thinking for my Nikon D800E, 14-24mm F2.8 at 14mm and F2.8, 30 seconds at ISO6400 which is quite clean.
Also, do you use in camera noise reduction on?
Is RAW really needed or is jpeg fine?
Post processing software is usually Lightroom 4.1?
Greg.
|
Hi Greg,
Good to hear. You certainly have the system to capture some top notch sequences.
>When you said you did multi day 12 day day/night time lapse is that with
>one camera? Wouldn't the memory cards fill up way before that?
5 cameras. Totally crazy thing to try in retrospect. It taught me a hell of lot though, both technically and about myself. I did it to provide the backdrop for a 'loss of the night sky' sequence for the IMAX film Outside In (now know as 'In Saturn's Rings'). They partially funded it.
I got about 97% of the sequence. 3 glitches caused loss of some day footage, all caused by faulty USB connections which blue screened the netbooks. Fortunately, the lost coverage was during clear days. The night coverage was almost complete except for loss of one camera for 2 hours.
So to your question. I swapped cards at 2 points during the day. 1 64 and 1 32 Gig card per camera. This meant stopping the system for around 3 minutes. In the final film, the day portion will be sped up and many frames blended so loss of 3 minutes won't be noticed...and most days were cloud free.
>You must have used a plug in power supply?
I used 3 solar panels each rated at 90 watt hours and 4 110 amp SLA batteries to power the system. Originally I wanted to use DC-DC adaptors, but these proved unreliable, so went DC-AC-DC with a sine wave inverter. That component performed flawlessly and provided adequate power... close to break even in terms of power in, power out. You can see the rig running at 0:34 s in the clip.
I hope to write up the whole experience when back in Perth and post it on a blog. It's taken me this long to recover from the thing to contemplate writing it up.
>What sort of settings do you recommend?
>I am thinking for my Nikon D800E, 14-24mm F2.8 at 14mm and F2.8, 30 >seconds at ISO6400 which is quite clean.
Sounds about right, but I'd probably reduce the ISO to 3200, or maybe 4000? Haven't seen any D800E RAWs myself so can't say how good 6400 is compared to my 5D2. I did do those tests comparing the 5D2 v 5D3 RAWs and the latter was about 1/2 a stop better.
>Also, do you use in camera noise reduction on?
Best to leave all camera noise reduction off. There are many better noise reduction options in post. I find the in camera ones are too aggressive and overly smooth the image.
>Is RAW really needed or is jpeg fine?
Ultimately RAW, but jpeg is fine for getting started. If you're planning to do a killer sequence, certainly use RAW as it will future proof the footage. With timelapse, you'll probably have a high failure rate to start with - at least I did. No point wasting disk space on the early footage.
>Post processing software is usually Lightroom 4.1?
I use After Effects and Premiere Pro, but Lightroom and LR Timelapse is a good combination to start with. If you want to do fancier stuff like time remapping and stabilization you'll probably want one of the dedicated video editing packages like Adobe AE/PP, Sony Vegas, etc.
Hope that helps and good luck.
