Tommygun45 wrote:
Yes thats fantastic. If you wouldn't mind do you think you could let us in on how to do that with our sets ups? I have lightroom already but not the other two things mentioned there.
It reminded me of a scene from some movie where they are launching arrows to begin a battle. Very neat.
Hi Tommy!
Setup is very basic really. I've got the NEX 5N with the standard 16mm pancake. I need the most light I can with a wide angle, and this is the best lens I've got at the moment.
Tripod is just a $20 Hama one - no fancy mounts
To get timelapse out of the NEX you need to make use of the infrared remote shutter. This is triggered by one of these -
http://www.gentles.ltd.uk/gentled/auto.htm. Looks pretty basic (and is) but does the job fantastically velcro'd to the front.
The getLED above was set to 4 seconds.
The exposure was 1.6 seconds, ISO 400, f2.8. You'll find that you can go quite high with the ISO for timelapse without any noticeable loss in quality, and I could have got away with it really. I wanted trails on the Chinese lanterns though, so wanted 1.5 sec min really.
The NEX will 'process' (think it does a black frame) for as long as the exposure is, so 3.2 seconds plus a bit for it to mess with the screen and you're on the limit of the 4 seconds. I'd like to disable this processing stage if poss. I'll have to mess around with the options a bit more.
You need everything set to manual. If the camera starts automatically messing around with the ISO, aperture or exposure you'll have annoying jumps/flicker in the output as the camera steps up or down. Just pick what you think will work and stick with it. It's a lot easier later.
To adjust the pics and get the pan effect you need to use LRTimelapse -
http://lrtimelapse.com/. The demo gives you 400 images per shot to play with and it's more than enough for most things. I'll probably end up buying this over the next week or so. To quote "LRTimelapse is the tool to make professional looking time lapse movies in an Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Camera RAW or Adobe After Effects workflow."
I'm using it with Lightroom, which seems the best option if you've got it.
Basically you run the sequence through LRTimelapse which reads in the files and identifies the brightness etc. You set key frames in the sequence where you want to have adjustments in LRTimelapse (generally first and last) and click save. These frames are then marked with a one-star review in Lightroom.
Open up Lightroom and you can adjust the keyframes to your liking. This could include crops, which if you move the frame of the crop between keyframes you get the Ken Burns / pan effect. Click save then open up again in LRTimelapse.
LRTimelapse can then 'smooth' the adjustments for all of the frames in-between the keyframes you just edited in Lightroom. The crop on the left and then the right gets smoothed to create a pan effect. Same goes for any graphical/exposure adjustments.
Save it in LRTimelapse then open in Lightroom. Lightroom has a slideshow feature which with a bit of playing around outputs the movie.
You can then edit the various sequences in iMovie or whatever.
Phew!
Didn't realise it was going to be that long. If you've got any questions let me know. If you've already got Lightroom though I'd definitely give it a try for the sake of 30 quid on the GentLED.
