La Riviera Maya - Time lapse

[LeeIs]

Hi guys,

I shot this in September. I hope you enjoy it and let me know what you think. Some of you might recognize a shot or two from the critique forum

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pcws9Ojl5TM

[Kokopeli]

Excellent film Liban! One of the biggest reasons I just bought a D7000 was so I could use its built-in intervalometer for time lapse footage.

Can you this time-lapse noob some pointers?

[LeeIs]

Hey kokopeli, sure I can.

1. start with a photo. if it doesn't look like a good photograph, it won't be a good timelapse. take shots as u normally would when you come across a good scene and when you look on your viewfinder and it looks super nice, then keep the composition and settings, then swtich to jpeg small and fire away!
2. keep intervals between shots short for smoother more fluid motion. especially if you're shooting cars at night, make the interval as short as your camera can support. otherwise u'll get staccato type of motion. choppy. so in general, make the interval 1 sec i think that's the shortest interval possible.
3. make use of photoshop and the actions pallette if you wanna make changes on the hundreds of shots you take. if you go to my channel on youtube.com/libanphotography look at the main featured video there. and u'll see the amount of editing i did for that selective colour time lapse. it was all actions and photoshop. So get familiar with that if you wanna make a lot of changes, otherwise if you followed step 1 properly you won't need to.

There's some starting pionts. if you have any questions u can either bump this thread and ask here, that way hopefully it might be benefitial for anyone else that has the same questions or you can pm on here.

i'm going away in 2 days though and will be back by the 10th of jan. so wont' be around much for the next week or so.

best of luck!

[Kokopeli]

Thanks for the tips Liban. I will look over your other films. If I have further questions, I'll hit you up.

[Kokopeli]

What program do you use to piece all the photos together to make the video? Quicktime? Something better?

[LeeIs]

I use quicktime pro for initial putting together clips. it does a good job.

then i take those clips and import them in to final cut pro to edit them together and with the music.

[LeeIs]

Also forgot to mention the math behind time lapses.

If I shoot with 1 second intervals between shots and 2 second exposures for a night/dusk type of shot, that's 3 seconds total for every shot.

Video frames/sec are usually no less than 24 fps, so for every second video I must shoot 24 pictures or 24x3 = 72 seconds of shooting time ( alittle over a minute of conitueous shooting for about 1 second of video)

So if I want a 15 second clip, that makes it 72 x 15 = 1080 seconds or 18 minutes of shooting time to get a 15 second clip.

I generate those clips in quick time pro. about 10-15 seconds each. then import them all in to fcp for final editing together the complete video. (just clarifying the clip vs. the entire video bit)