[Ron Craig]

Are you guys saying that you eject firewire drives before every computer shutdown? I always eject drives before I disconnect them from the computer but I don’t eject those drives if I’m just shutting down the computer to which they are attached. Doesn’t the computer shut-down process include properly handling whatever external FW drives are connected? Or am I trusting the OS too much?

[Ron Craig]

Yes, agreed. We’ll be trying all the options.

Cheers,

Ron

[Ron Craig]

Hi Evan,

It’s a reasonable question and your math is certainly correct. But I don’t plan on using 80 seconds of time lapse. If my limited past experience with time lapse is any guide, I won’t use the full piece, start-to-finish. We’re not shooting a definite beginning and end, such as the classics: flower opening or building construction, etc. I expect to use only part of the whole piece. Also, I am preparing for the opportunity to speed up the time lapse sequence even more in post. I like having more frames available when I do that so I can get the look I want. It’s smoother that way and there’s not a lot of disparate objects popping in and out of frame. They’re more likely to move in and move out.

And also….I acknowledge that I might be trying to be way too conservative here. It might be that I can achieve the results that I want with significantly fewer frames. That’s the reason for the testing sessions that we are planning.

— Ron

[Ron Craig]

Thanks very much to Jerry, bogie, and Chris. All of this is helpful. I just need to run some tests now. The obstacle, however, seems to be technological. My proposed time lapse sequences aren’t very long and I was hoping to do 2 or 3 frames per second reliably for 20-30 minutes. I don’t think that’s going to be possible (even with the Canon controller software although I will have to test that) with the buffers and flash memory cards in use today. So I’ll either settle for a longer interval or we’ll shoot on the HDX 900. Or both.

Now.. on to the tests.

Ron

[Ron Craig]

Hi Chris,

I certainly see the appeal of this approach. My issue, though is the number of frames per second that I can get with the digital still camera. What frame rate did you use? How did you select that frame rate? Do you have any examples online? Thanks.

Ron

[Ron Craig]

Hi bogiesan,

I’m going to do the thread search that you advised right away. Your comments all make sense. I’m leaning back toward shooting regular speed with the HDX 900 and then doing the speed changes in post because my sequences will be only about 20-30 minutes long. It seems that digital SLR still cameras can’t shoot frames quickly enough to give me the frame speed I need. Correct me if I’m wrong. Do you know of a still camera that can reliably shoot 3-4 fps over that period of time? I’d love it if I could do that because of the additional opportunities that would give me in AE but I’m running up against limitations of frame buffers and memory cards.

Ron

[Ron Craig]

Hi Dave,

Thanks. Well, I clearly have some work to do to get up-to-speed on this endeavor. I do have experience with exposure anomalies on time-lapse sequences so your point on working in 32-bit mode is well-taken. But as for “animating” AE’s Levels and effect settings, do you know of any tutorials on that (in case I need them)? Or perhaps the manual will do that for me? Although I’m a longtime user of AE, I know that my knowledge only scratches the surface of its capabilities.

Now I’ll try to find out in AE can handle the flavor of raw files we’ll be generating.

Ron

[Ron Craig]

Hi Lars,
Your point about manual settings is a very good one. I’ve had some experience with this while shooting timelapse with a video camera, too. Thanks for the reminder.

As for working with raw images and converting to tif, I do know that I have to do this but I have not thought about the workflow yet. Haven’t done that before. If you have words of wisdom and experience I certainly would appreciate them.

Cheers,
Ron

[Ron Craig]

Generally I agree. But I have both technical and logistical considerations. I do like the idea of imparting some subtle “camera moves” to the time-lapse in post, which the large SLR images would allow me to do while maintaining high res. Also, using the SLR for time lapse would allow us to continue shooting elsewhere with the 900 while our time-lapse set-ups are being monitored by a production assistant. That would be valuable time. I would also save some time after the shoot by reducing the amount of Firestore download time.

We’ll test everything out and see what we come up with. Thanks for your thoughts and advice, Jeremy, Mark and others.

Ron

[Ron Craig]

We don’t know yet. We’ll be overseas and we’ll just be looking for opportunities to add visual variety to the pieces. Probably some will include city scenes that are distinctive to a particular location; others hopefully will include customer industrial scenes, etc.

After reviewing everything on this thread we’re going for the belt-and-suspenders approach. We have the HDX 900 and we’ll also be shooting the series of high res images with a digital SLR. Preceded by an adequate amount of testing.