Time lapse advise

T

Tdes

Suspended / Banned
Messages
440
Name
Tony
Edit My Images
Yes
Morning to all,

I have a job coming up that will have part of it lending itself perfectly to a time lapse. It will be 5 hours of someone laying a pice of floor art in LVT. It is next to a mezzanine so the camera/tripod can be up high looking down on the scene.

Will be using my spare camera, canon 77d which has a built in time-lapse feature, I think it outputs a .mov file at 1080.

I will be running a few trials beforehand, but my gut instinct is to buy an intervalometer to snap the pics as stills and put them together afterwards. this way I could take more than I need and have more speed control in post. It will also let me snap at the full 24mp so I can add some movement (zoom/pan) to a 1080 video because of the extra resolution.

It is indoors but there are opaque panels in the roof so ideally would have auto iso to deal with the fluctuations in brightness over the 5 hours (it runs from 2pm to 7pm beginning of July). I am sure I can set the min and max iso values available for auto iso, so still have some control. Aperture probably f8 - f11 (to get the best out of the lens).

Was thinking a shot every 15 seconds, so 1200 total. At 24 fps it would give a 50 second video, which I could speed up without issue in post.

The last thing is shutter speed, the 180 degree rule I have read about says it should be about 7.5 seconds, but I think I could get arms disappearing of the person being a smudge in some shots. Any advice on this would be appreciated, going to try 1s to start when practising. I cannot get into that venue until the day before so may have to get a nd filter incase!

Please let me know if I am miles out on any of the above thinking, it is something I need to get right, but only have one chance!

Many thanks, T
 
That all sounds basically OK but from experience I would suggest,

You might want to think about mains power or an extended battery pack so that you don't have to swap batteries half way through.

It's much better to shoot everything in manual and raw. I use RAWBlend and Panolapse. The RAWBlend with help will also help with the exposure fluctuations caused by mains lighting flicker.

Manual focus your lens so that the lens isn't re-focusing every time.

Use the widest aperture you can while getting the DOF you want. With careful focusing and use of hyperfocal distance you may be able to use the widest aperture you have. The problem with small apertures is that the lens doesn't stop down to exactly the same point every time, the smaller the aperture the more the inconsistencies show up which can give you flickering.

If you are shooting at 24fps a more normal shutter speed would be 1/50th.

If I were shooting it I would use aperture priority, fixed ISO and WB. In your tests go for an exposure that's going to give you a shutter speed that stays above 1/20th at the darkest point of the session and let it go as high as it need to during the brighter parts of the shoot. That's going to give you the best image quality and you might get some motion blur on fast moving people but they won't disappear into smudges.
 
ah5168 said:
That all sounds basically OK but from experience I would suggest,

You might want to think about mains power or an extended battery pack so that you don't have to swap batteries half way through.

It's much better to shoot everything in manual and raw. I use RAWBlend and Panolapse. The RAWBlend with help will also help with the exposure fluctuations caused by mains lighting flicker.

Manual focus your lens so that the lens isn't re-focusing every time.

Use the widest aperture you can while getting the DOF you want. With careful focusing and use of hyperfocal distance you may be able to use the widest aperture you have. The problem with small apertures is that the lens doesn't stop down to exactly the same point every time, the smaller the aperture the more the inconsistencies show up which can give you flickering.

If you are shooting at 24fps a more normal shutter speed would be 1/50th.

If I were shooting it I would use aperture priority, fixed ISO and WB. In your tests go for an exposure that's going to give you a shutter speed that stays above 1/20th at the darkest point of the session and let it go as high as it need to during the brighter parts of the shoot. That's going to give you the best image quality and you might get some motion blur on fast moving people but they won't disappear into smudges.
Click to expand...
Thank you for the advise, very appreciated!

Will have a play this week!

T
 
Tdes said:
The last thing is shutter speed, the 180 degree rule I have read about says it should be about 7.5 seconds....
Click to expand...
That seems like a bizarrely long shutter speed. Why would you not want to use a "normal" shutter speed like 1/100th or 1/25th or whatever you get indoors with a sensible ISO and a sensible aperture?
 
StewartR said:
That seems like a bizarrely long shutter speed. Why would you not want to use a "normal" shutter speed like 1/100th or 1/25th or whatever you get indoors with a sensible ISO and a sensible aperture?
Click to expand...

Reading up on time-lapse it is to get enough blur so things don't just appear and disappear. I have never done any time-lapse so it was purely from reading on the web. T
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top