A Night in the Hunter Valley - all night timelapse from IISAC2010

[iceman (Mike)]

Hi all

Inspired by Phil Hart and Alex Cherney's brilliant timelapses, I set my camera up at IISAC2010 on the Saturday afternoon to catch the evening cloud movement with the hope of some clear skies at night.
It was a bit of a risk, since we had cloudy skies and intermittent rain the previous nights, but the risk paid off and the skies cleared beautifully for about 6 hours.

This all night timelapse movie starts facing South, capturing a tree stump that I've seen at IISAC for the past 5 years and always wanted to use in a night sky scene. I went up to check the camera at about 11:40pm and saw Orion rising in the East, so I changed scene to capture Orion rising for the remainder of the night.

I collected the dew covered camera at 6am (still snapping away), but luckily the lens didn't fog up until after it had been capturing bright white due to the long exposures.

Thanks to Phil for loaning me his 12v Canon 40D power adapter that let me run in the field without power and without worrying about batteries!

Canon 40D, Sigma 17-70mm lens.
Day scene: Auto exposure (fixed f/2.8 focal ratio) @ISO100 with 5s between each image.
Night scenes: 25s exposure @ ISO1600 (f/2.8)

All captured in small jpeg. Timelapse made using virtual dub. Final movie made using Windows Live Movie Maker.

Watch the 1920x1080 HD videos on:

* Vimeo: http://www.vimeo.com/15944391
* Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-ZVEui_HoA&hd=1


Star trail images attached.

Thanks for looking, and thanks to Phil and Alex for the continuing inspiration.

[h0ughy (David)]

i see you had fun

[strongmanmike (Michael)]

Ahhh sigh..takes me right back..... miss Lostock already

[Martin Pugh]

Well done Mike
great composition.

I hope those clouds went away for the duration.

cheers
Martin

[Ric]

Excellent Mike.

I really enjoyed that.

Cheers

[alexch (Alex)]

Nice one, Mike!

The daylight portion adds to it, I tried to capture the twilight transitions but Nikon does not shift the exposure settings gradually enough so it flickered. The music choice is excellent too.

One question - why there are black borders around the frame during video?

Alex

[iceman (Mike)]

Thanks guys, appreciate your comments.

Originally Posted by alexch

The daylight portion adds to it, I tried to capture the twilight transitions but Nikon does not shift the exposure settings gradually enough so it flickered.

Yeh there's a bit of flickering in mine but with the 5-sec gap between images it was over pretty quickly and not too noticeable.

The music choice is excellent too.

Thanks - it was tough finding music that fit, especially when you have to listen to loads of samples of creative commons music.
Turned out this one had the speaking parts in just the right spots.

One question - why there are black borders around the frame during video?

Good question - not sure what happened there. They came out of VirtualDub ok so I think Windows Live Video Maker did something strange.

I would've preferred to use Sony Vegas but had trouble saving uncompressed movies out of it (it kept crashing on me or running out of memory).

[alexch (Alex)]

Originally Posted by iceman

I would've preferred to use Sony Vegas but had trouble saving uncompressed movies out of it (it kept crashing on me or running out of memory).

Try Version 9 - much more stable, it still available as an update from Sony but works as a trial too:
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/...moviestudiope9

[troypiggo (Troy)]

Those are fantastic, Mike! First go? Looks like you've been doing them for years.

[Octane (Humayun)]

Mike,

I thoroughly enjoyed the video -- was very, very well done!

I thought the ending was excellent with the brightening naturally fading into the white for the end titles credits. Excellent!

H

[Phil Hart]

great work mike! the effort finding the foreground was well rewarded.. and that stump works even better in the timelapse than in the star trails. the daytime scene is very well recorded and has a great feel.

hope you recovered a little of your astro mojo with that piece!

phil

[iceman (Mike)]

Originally Posted by Octane

Mike,

I thoroughly enjoyed the video -- was very, very well done!

I thought the ending was excellent with the brightening naturally fading into the white for the end titles credits. Excellent!

H

Thanks H - I agree with the white. It made a great transition.

Originally Posted by troypiggo

Those are fantastic, Mike! First go? Looks like you've been doing them for years.

Thanks Troy - I've done some before (here on my site) and I was reasonably happy with them at the time, but in the past year, Alex and Phil have really upped the ante and the quality of their work has been outstanding. It's made my previous efforts look amateur so I really wanted to improve and get on the way to reaching their level.

Originally Posted by alexch

Try Version 9 - much more stable, it still available as an update from Sony but works as a trial too:
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/...moviestudiope9

I've been using V10 - are you saying V9 is more stable?

Originally Posted by philiphart

great work mike! the effort finding the foreground was well rewarded.. and that stump works even better in the timelapse than in the star trails. the daytime scene is very well recorded and has a great feel.

hope you recovered a little of your astro mojo with that piece!

phil

Thanks Phil - it was nice to have some data from the weekend. How are yours coming along?

[alexch (Alex)]

Originally Posted by iceman

I've been using V10 - are you saying V9 is more stable?

Yes - heaps more stable than V10.

[Spares (Glenn)]

Nice work Mike
Loved the cars and the two planes.
The tail lights form the cars making the stump burst into red was fantastic.

Spares

[Inmykombi (Geoff)]

Well done Mike,
Looks like the hard work paid off.

[gregbradley]

Great video Mike. Fabulous.

Greg.

[danielsun]

Excellent work Mike. I really enjoyed that!


Cheers Daniel.

[RB (Andrew)]

I was looking forward to this !
Well done mate great to see you getting back into it, that turned out great.
Nice soundtrack too.

The Startrail Stump looks so cool.

[iceman (Mike)]

Thanks guys - appreciate your comments.

And thanks Alex - V9 does seem better/more stable on the tests I've run. I might re-process the data using Sony Vegas when I get a few spare hours.. likely never

Cheers