time lapse shoot

[Sean Emer]

I’m not an expert on time lapse photography, but I was on the location of a discovery channel show a week or so ago, and the crew did a timelapse shot throughout the whole day with a still camera. The show is called Really Big Things I think, so if you want to see how their time lapse stuff looks, check out one of their episodes. Sorry I couldn’t be more helpful.

If only life had ‘Ctrl-Z’

[Lars Bunch]

Hi,

I’ve never used a video camera to do time lapse, but I have used a DSLR.

Obviously the DSLR will give you a much bigger image to work with and can give you a great deal more control and flexibility, but it also gives you many opportunities to shoot your self in the foot.

When shooting time lapse, set all your exposure and color balance features to manual. If you set them to automatic you will get exposure and color fluctuations from frame to frame. Auto white balance will make subtle changes to the exposure from something as minor as a cloud passing by. Also if you have an auto focus lens, set that to manual as well.

If you are going to have extreme exposure differences throughout the shot, daylight into night for example, you may want to shoot the images in RAW format so that you can control the values in a program like Lightroom or Aperture. Obviously this gets fairly labor intensive in post production, but Lightroom (and I assume Aperture) lets you apply the same exposure correction to any number of images so if you need to adjust everything, it’s not a one by one process.

Another advantage of shooting with the DSLR is that the resulting shot can be larger than HD resolution, allowing you to re-frame the shot to better suit your needs down the line. (As well as sell it for stock)

My feeling is that, while a video camera may be able to do an adequate job, time lapse requires so much set up work and patience just to get a few seconds that you might as well do just a little bit more work and get a shot that can look a whole lot better and be reused in any format.

No matter what, you should make tests so see how feasible your workflow will be. If you need to work really fast, the DSLR method may not be for you, although when it comes to time lapse, nothing happens very fast.

Hope this helps,

Lars

[Steve Roberts]

Use the still camera, then import the numbered stills into AE as a sequence.