Time lapse movies

I was pointed in the direction of Ross Ching's website and more specifically his Eclectic 2.0 movie recently. It's stunning, and then you read the making of section. It's shot on EOS digital SLR cameras, the images are cropped to full HD resolution 1920x1080 and turned into a movie with Apple Quicktime Pro. All you need is a Canon DSLR a way to trigger the camera on a regular basis and some patience.

I tried using a Canon EOS-1D Mark III and the TC-80N3 timer controller, the results were pretty interesting - as far as clouds moving across the sky over a couple of hours can be. I found some practical tips. Use aperture priority mode to keep the depth of field consistent from shot to shot and batch process the images to the required 1920 x 1080 size using some tools - photoshop and actions is a tough one to swallow. I used an automator action on a MAC, though the Faststone resizer on a PC would also do fine. One thing I found was some cases of flicker in the movies I made using Quicktime on the mac. I was speaking to a colleague who had seen similar problems when he had tried. Our consensus is that you want to split the sequences in to around 950 images or so and do them in Quicktime to make the clips and join the clips together later. Looks like quicktime has some problem around the 1000 images in a sequence mark.

- p4pictures -