GH2 Night sky timelapse

T

TheCameraLens

Member
In a few weeks I will be going on vacation to the beach and one thing I would like to try and do while I am there is to get a good timelapse video of the night sky with stars moving across the sky. Does anyone have any recommendations on the best way to do this with a GH2 with 14-140 lens? Am I better off taking a bunch of stills at full res and cropping out a 1920x1080 image in post so I can do a simulated pan if I want, or shooting at 1920x1080 in camera? What is a good starting place for settings? ISO, Shutter speed, Aperture, Interval etc? What about other settings such as Slow Shutter Noise Reduction, Sharpness, Contrast, WB, Colorspace etc.? I am planning on having the camera on a tripod (duh!) with OIS off and manual focus. I believe the way to ensure infinity focus is to power off and on in MF mode. Is that correct?
Am I right in thinking that no hack improves the still image capabilities of the GH2 and that they only improve the video side? If I am wrong, is there a recommended hack? I currently have Flowmotion V2 on my GH2. I am also making the assumption that a bunch of stills is the way to go rather than trying to shoot video and speeding up in post. I haven't tried doing this before as I have too much light pollution here. So I am assuming that there is not enough light to get a good video in 1/24 sec.
Any help or pointers would be much appreciated. Also if anyone has any sample clips and can share their settings that would be great.

TIA

Colin
 
You won't get anything shooting video. Not enough light. Definitely you'll want to shoot stills. Having said that, I don't think it will work very well, because you'll have to crank the ISO up and use a long shutter. You'll end up with too much noise. At night you need a much faster lens. f4 is the fasted that lens can go. With the 20mm f1.7 you'll get 2 1/2 stops more light and that really can make a huge difference. Actually, dvxuser is fantastic for video info, but for time lapse I'd suggest posting your question on a photography forum or even better, on timelapse.org.
 
keylight said:
You won't get anything shooting video. Not enough light. Definitely you'll want to shoot stills. Having said that, I don't think it will work very well, because you'll have to crank the ISO up and use a long shutter. You'll end up with too much noise. At night you need a much faster lens. f4 is the fasted that lens can go. With the 20mm f1.7 you'll get 2 1/2 stops more light and that really can make a huge difference. Actually, dvxuser is fantastic for video info, but for time lapse I'd suggest posting your question on a photography forum or even better, on timelapse.org.
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Thanks for the info. Yeah, I know the 14-140 isn't ideal for this, but I thought maybe someone on here had tried it. I have seen a few posts on here about night time timelapse videos and the tips vary a lot. I was trying to find out what might (emphasis on might) work with my setup. I will check out the link. Thanks again.

Colin
 
I've done it but the 20mm 1.7 gives MUCH better results. I think you'll just have to use the bulb setting to get about 2 min exposures wide open @ f4 and see what you get. Try to keep the ISO as low as possible. You can use the built in noise reduction which is annoying but helps... for ever long exposure, it takes another long exposure with the shutter closed and subtracts the difference in noise.
 
omnikron said:
I've done it but the 20mm 1.7 gives MUCH better results. I think you'll just have to use the bulb setting to get about 2 min exposures wide open @ f4 and see what you get. Try to keep the ISO as low as possible. You can use the built in noise reduction which is annoying but helps... for ever long exposure, it takes another long exposure with the shutter closed and subtracts the difference in noise.
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Doesn't that give you a long star trail though? I was thinking I would be better off by stacking copies of the same image and using screen or something in Photoshop to get a brighter image. I could run a batch on all images to get a brightened version of each frame before making the video from the combined frames.
 
TheCameraLens said:
Doesn't that give you a long star trail though? I was thinking I would be better off by stacking copies of the same image and using screen or something in Photoshop to get a brighter image. I could run a batch on all images to get a brightened version of each frame before making the video from the combined frames.
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Won't give you a long star trail, but the stars will have a tiny bit of blur from the movement. Stacking won't make much of a difference in terms of the blur. 2 minutes is 2 minutes. The only solution to cutting the time is to use a faster lens or higher ISO.
 
keylight said:
Won't give you a long star trail, but the stars will have a tiny bit of blur from the movement. Stacking won't make much of a difference in terms of the blur. 2 minutes is 2 minutes. The only solution to cutting the time is to use a faster lens or higher ISO.
Click to expand...

I meant using a shorter shutter speed and stacking to increase brightness. But I know what you mean. Noise in an image will always build up with stacking so it is a trade off between a lot of factors. I think you need a small amount of blur or you may end up with stars not showing because they occupy less than a pixel when shot with a wideangle lens. I guess I will have to do some experimenting with my setup and hope I can get some good results.
 
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