Photography timelapse

[Ken Minehan]

hello guys, What is the best way to go about doing photography timelapses. I want to shoot in the highest resolution that the camera will allow me too.

 

Do you need a hard drive to store the pictures instead of a CF card?

 

How do you know at what intervals you need to shoot at? I would assume the intervals would be different when shooting clouds or traffic.

 

Anyone with experience on this, would love to hear from you.

cheers

ken minehan

[Ralph Keyser]

hello guys, What is the best way to go about doing photography timelapses. I want to shoot in the highest resolution that the camera will allow me too.

 

Do you need a hard drive to store the pictures instead of a CF card?

 

How do you know at what intervals you need to shoot at? I would assume the intervals would be different when shooting clouds or traffic.

 

Anyone with experience on this, would love to hear from you.

cheers

ken minehan

Ken,

 

I'd recommend a search on this forum, and you might search at cinematography.net as well. You'll find plenty of information. It sounds like you are looking at DSLR photography, although many 35mm motion picture cameras can do timelapse as well.

 

As for hard drive vs. CF, it all depends on how many of what size frame you need. You mentioned wanting to shoot at the highest possible resolution, and I'd suggest that you evaluate that against your final use of the timelapse. I've found that for many uses, especially SD and HD, lower resolution from the still camera still gives you more than enough resolution for your target while providing lower data storage requirements and quicker processing times.

 

The interval selection is up to you. There are no absolutes, and I don't even know of any great rules of thumb. You'll want to shoot some and experiment with the process. Different intervals can give you very different feels for the final clip, so consider it one of your creative variables.

[Daniel Sheehy]

You can either use large capacity cards and change them at pre-calculated intervals, or you could shoot straight to a HDD. This depends on how long the event you're recording is. If it's a matter of hours, then cards should be fine. If you're thinking weeks, you might want to look at shooting straight to HDD tethered to a small computer and intervalometer.

 

The intervals, as Ralph noted, have a huge effect on the final look. So you might want to test several options first. It's a combination of the interval between frames, and how long the shutter stays open when recording the frame, that shape the final look. A slow shutter speed will help smooth out the final clip. A high shutter speed will give you a series of nice clear images, but it will tend to stutter when run into a sequence.

 

The place to start might be to decide how long you need the finished, compressed sequence to be, and then calculate the number of frames and the required intervals backwards from that, testing a variety of shutter speeds along the way.

[Matt Butler]

Ken,

 

check out this site, it specialises in dSLR applications.

 

http://www.timescapes.org/

 

(disclaimer : I subscribe to that site.)

[J. Søren Viuf]

My two cents:

 

Having shot some time-lapse on the Red, the settings I found to be smooth and still have a noticeable "lapse" was 1 frame every 4 seconds. It was quite nice and viewable without any speed modification.

 

However, if you want, it's probably better just to shoot, say, 1 fps and then speed it up in post.

[Tom Lowe]

Ken,

 

check out this site, it specialises in dSLR applications.

 

http://www.timescapes.org/

 

(disclaimer : I subscribe to that site.)

 

Yep. That's the place to go. :)

 

For normal DSLR timelapse, you should simply shoot to large CF cards.