New Time-Lapse

I made my first attempt earlier this evening and it turned out really lame. Too many mistakes to post. But at least I didn't travel far. Shot some stuff in the backyard. Biggest mistake I made was keeping the camera on auto so the exposure fluctuated really bad as the clouds rolled by.
I stink! - but I learn......

Mehnkle - You might want to try this.
 
Sirius, its all a learning experiment. I take a lot of night pictures. So that's why I kind of know what to look for. I was doing long exposures back when I was still using my film camera. Damn I just realized where you live. Las Vegas should be an awsome place to get some time-lapse. Is that where your living now?
 
Yep - Vegas Baby! Wait till I get this timelapse thing down and I'm gonna post some slick **** from the strip. I think my first serious attempt is gonna be Red Rock again like the one I posted a while back shot with the DVX.
We should hook up halfway around death valley and shoot some stuff together. Maybe around Edwards afb where all the windmill generators are????
 
Can't wait to see that stuff. Are you doing night stuff or are you shooting in the day. Night shooting on the strip would be the only way to go.
 
The strip would have to be night time - besides the daytime temps are starting to rise........ Although today was really nice.
 
Hey Drew - Shot some more stuff toay that I hope to have posted by tomorrow. Still not the "eye candy" quality of your stuff because I'm just experimenting in my backyard till i get the technique down. At least the stuff from today looks ok. Just rolling clouds.....
 
Can't wait to see it man. Are you using that remote controller for the 20D? For me its the only way to go, unless you want to carry around your computer. Your lucky I'm not out there to ride your ass about get out to the strip and taking some pictures. I'm sure you know the spots you want to hit already. But I do understand you don't want to waste your time unless the shots are going to turn out the way you want. Its all a learning experience. I'm going to try and get some more stuff tomorrow after work. I'll post it here when its ready.
 
Sirius, also if your going to post a clip please encode it in Quicktime. I hate crappy Windows Media Player. If it was that little dog in your picture I would have drowned it a long time ago. I love dogs but that's how much I hate Media Player.
 
Hey Drew, if you were to do something like this in the daytime how would you alter your settings? I would assume a lower ISO speed but I find it strange that in your settings you already have the ISO down to 200. From my reading up on the 20D I discovered that lower ISOs are for when you have a lot of light and higher ones are for low light situations. So for daytime you'd probably go 100 ISO then?

-Edalgo
 
Im assuming that’s due to the fact that the shutter is left open for a few seconds. Is that how you get away with such a low ISO?
 
With a lower ISO you get less noise, and better colors. In order to use a low ISO at night you'll have to leave the shutter open longer. One up side to this is that you get the nice motion streaks from cars, planes and anything else moving in the shot.
 
I'm going to do some day stuff soon and when I do I will more than likely either keep the ISO at 200 or go down to 100. For one of the shots on this last clip I posted I had the ISO at 400, the clip of the planes leaving LAX. I did that because there really wasn't that much light when I was shooting out towards the ocean. Also I was trying to get the stars in the shot. I can see them in 720p and they move just a little bit. I would be very surprised if anyone could see them on the Quicktime file. I'm going to do more star stuff when I have the chance to get away from LA.
 
OK, here it is.
You'll need to right click and "save as" for it to play.
It's about 40seconds, 13.3 megs., 1080p, 29.97fps, wmv9. (sorry Drew) edited from five different angles.
Not quite the eye candy that Drew's been posting because this was shot from my backyard.

Drew - I don't have the remote but I've been using that software I mentioned a while back, DSLR Remote Pro, It seems to have one limitation in that you can only take images once every two seconds I'm guessing because of the USB transfer speed.
I gonna try to make a QT file for you. Ever since I upgraded to QTpro7 for Windoze I've been have quicktime problems. Pro7 for windows is a beta version and I'm beginning to understand why.

The closeup shot of the moon was done with the 70-300mm lens at 300mm.

mehnkle - I'm not sure why you are having such poor battery performance. I do have the Dual battery holder that I mentioned in a previous post but even still, running off two batteries I was able to shoot everything you see in this clip which consist of about 1200 frames plus my screw up from yesterday of 1000 frames and I just got a low battery warning. Of course I'm not recording to the CF, I'm streaming USB directly to my harddrive which must take a bit of power....
 
One thing we all need to consider is the fact that CMOS sensors have a limited life-span. I remember reading a while back that the expected lifespan of CMOS imaging sensors was 200,000 images. Assuming you took a normal roll of film (36exp) every single day 200,000/36=5555.55 days/365 days in a year =15.2 years.
No problem, I'd be happy if the camera lasted 15 years.

Now do what we are doing - 300-500 frames per shoot.

200,000/500=400 days/365 = 1.09 years.........
 
That's some interesting math you did on the CMOS lifespan. I was thinking about that when I started doing this time-lapse stuff. Good thing I don't do this every day or that might be a problem. I'll have to check out your clip when I get home because I don't have Media Player on my PowerBook. Would be cool if you did a QT version of it. Can't wait to see it.
 
Sirius, its lookn very good for your first few trys. I really like the clouds. Did you stick with the same settings as Drew?
 
Sirius, I watched your clip and it looked good. The shots with the clouds looked really nice. The only thing I noticed was that there was a little bit of jerking to the shots. Maybe because of that 2 second delay you said the program had. But still it looked really nice. The images of the moon and the stars looked really cool also. I can't wait to start doing stuff like that also. Like I said before, I just need to get out of LA to do stuff like that. Keep it up man. Can't wait to see the stuff from the strip...when you get it.

BTW, did you end up getting the remote controller for the 20D?
 
Luke - Don't remember the exact exposure on the daylight cloud stuff. ISO was set at 200 for the daylight stuff and 400 for the nighttime stuff. It's just like ASA ratings with film. You want to use the lowest ISO setting you can with a decent shutter speed/f-stop combination. The higher the ISO setting you go with the more noise you will see. There's really no secret to this. Every DSLR lets you see your results on exposures. The only trick is to make sure whatever exposure works, put it on manual so it doesn't vary during the shots.

Drew - No, I haven't bought the remote controller and probably will not. I'll just stream to the laptop. My laptop is totally screwed up now since I installed QT7Pro beta. Already tried a system restore with no luck. Looks like I'll be doing a clean install. BUMMER.
At least I didn't install it on my main desktop editing machine.
 
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