My first time lapse, would like criticisms so I can make the next one better

R

RupertPupkin

Active member
Hey all,

Just got a T3i a week ago and I've been playing around with it quite a bit. I went with a Canon camera because on top of shooting video, I wanted to be able to make some awesome time lapses of the stars.

This was my first attempt, taken on my roof.

I live on the outside of a college campus so I thought light pollution would be too much to capture the stars, but I was pleasantly surprised how well the sensor picked them up.

It took me a bit of playing around with the settings to get a good capture, once I found a decent one I just stuck with it because I just wanted to shoot already. The video is only 4 seconds long, the time lapse was from approximately midnight to 1:30am.

Settings:

Magic lantern (used a remote for this, however)
Exposure time: 30 seconds
Intervals: 5 seconds between exposures
Lens: Nikkor-O 35mm f2 @ f4
ISO: 320

https://vimeo.com/49639948

I believe there is much room for the image to improve, so I would like your help on how to achieve a better image. Perhaps tweak some settings?

Thanks.
 
Thank you.

I had another question regarding workflow as well. I converted the raw pictures, then brought them into Final Cut and put them into the timeline frame by frame. This was an incredibly tedious task, so I figure there must be an easier way to do it. Any suggestions?
 
I haven't used Final Cut, so I'm not sure, but there should be an option to import all those picture files as a single stream (select the first one, tell the program it is the start of a stream, it loads them as if they were a video file)
 
RupertPupkin said:
This was an incredibly tedious task, so I figure there must be an easier way to do it. Any suggestions?
Click to expand...

Use QuickTime 7. You can tell it you are opening a picture sequence, select the first one in the series, and then it does the work for you. Save it out as a ProRes HQ file and import that into Final Cut Pro.
 
Hi.
Thanks for sharing. I really like the movement of the stars themselves. Really smooth.
My only criticism would be about the trees in the foreground. Any random movement, no matter how gentle and graceful in real time, has a real danger of becoming jerky and twitchy in a time lapse.
If that was your intention then that's fine but I tend to find that sort of movement off putting in the context of the scene. Though, if this was a city scene, then that very same jerky movement seems to work well (people scurrying to work etc). I would try to compose the scene with a non moving object in the fore ground . LIke a building, or a lamp post. There's something about a dead still object in a time lapse That really sells it as a scene.
Of course this is purely subjective at this level. It's great that you got out an did it. And as a first attempt it's really nice. It's obvious that you understand the mechanics of the process so to see what you come up with next should be quite exciting.
Sorry for the long post. And thanks again for sharing.
 
I'll take a look when I'm on a real computer (on my tablet at the moment) but you might also want to post it on timelapse.org. They have a new forum that I recently joined. And they can probably answer the workflow questions too. Or maybe the forums at timescapes.org. They have more users than timelapse.org, but timelapse.org looks like it's "open source" (they don't promote or favor any one person or project, they show a lot of different work and post tutorials and gear stuff). Who knows, they might even put your video up on their front page. Pretty cool site.
 
Thanks for the tip Gary, I shot another one last night so I will have to test out this method. I used a Nikkor 24mm 2.8 instead of the 35mm, and used a chimney in the foreground instead of a tree. I didn't get as many stars in this one however, not sure if it's the lens, or it was a slightly more hazy night.

Floyd, I can't agree with you more. I was going to ask if there would be a way to keep the tree still, but I guess there's no controlling the wind haha. The only thing I could think of is going into After Effects and mask a single frame of the tree with the moving stars, but I'm not going to go through that much trouble for a 4 second time lapse. Also thanks for the kind words, I can't wait for future ones as well. Like I said I shot another one last night with a chimney instead of trees which was a much better foreground object, however, I didn't get the exposure I would have liked for the stars. It might be the performance of the lens, as far as I know the 35mm is highly praised while the 24mm is just so-so. Guess I'll try the same shot with the 35mm and see if it makes any difference.

Keylight, thanks for the info. Since I plan on shooting a lot of time lapse, it's probably a good idea to post on a site dedicated to it.

EDIT: Finally got the second one up on vimeo. I'm not too fond of how it came out. https://vimeo.com/49778583

Also not sure what caused the lighting on the chimney to change, possibly cars driving by.
 
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