T2i Shooting a timelapse

W00DPUSHING

W00DPUSHING

Active member
Just wondering what picture quality to shoot my timelapses in? I shot one a L but there are black bars at the sides of the footage. I just wanna know what pic quality to shoot at to get no bars so it gels with the footage which i shoot at 1080p and 720p. Also what are some shutter/exposure settings you recommend for sunnny/night lapses?

cheers,
 
The stills shoot in more of a 4:3 format. You need to pull them into an editor like photoshop or aperture and crop them to the proper pixel ratio.
 
The stills are in 3:2 aspect ratio, if you try to fit them to a 16:9 frame you will either have black bars on the side or cropping from the top & bottom.

What are you using to create the timelapses? If you are using Premiere, AE or Vegas, you can just import the image sequence as a clip, then drop it on the timeline and zoom it so it fills the screen. It will import the stills at whatever resolution you shot them at so perfromance might be a little sluggish, but the benefit is that you get the full resolution to work with on the timeline to crop, zoom or pan.
 
Also, regarding shutter settings it makes things alot smoother if you try to stick to the 180 degree rule that you would normally use for shooting video so for photo's every 1 second, expose for 1/2 second, for photos every 2 seconds, expose for 1 second, etc. This will give motion blur that make movement in the frame (cars, people, etc) move smoothly. A longer exposure will also help to give more even exposures from frame to frame, avoiding some of the flickering problems you might get. Even on a bright sunny day, there are micro flacutations in light levels and a longer exposure will average these out across each exposure time.
 
You have the option to shoot stills in 16x9 ratio - it's in the manual somewhere. Most editing packages will import sequentially numbered jpegs and create a movie clip from them. I'd second the vote for long exposure times for timelapses - you should experiment to see what works for you. Anything with people, I tend to do a 2sec exposure every 5 secs, and with faster moving stuff (traffic for instance) I tend to shorten exposure and interval between shots.
 
I have found out that most of the times (cars, people, clouds) for a smooth image in 25fps, 0.8-1sec exposure 1 picture every 1 or 2 seconds.
For night, depending on available light exposure should be longer.
And of course if you are shooting in the dark or stars, 25-30 seconds exposure. I usually test with a still, before starting the timelapse.
If you check my London timelapse on my vimeo page, the Big Ben scene had 25 sec exposures.
 
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