Innovative time lapse video Ideas

[josealb]

Hello,
I'm in a project for making a short film about my university. Since I'm more of a photographer than videographer I had thought of doing a set of time lapse scenes in and outside the buildings. People switching classrooms, sunrise and sunset over the buildings of the campus, and then some panning scenes about the instruments we use and our projects (It's for a technical university in Spain) A star trail video would also be great but I don't think I can achieve anything in an over-illuminated city
Technical know-how and innovation is strongly rated so I wanted to ask you what techniques you can think of that show some skills in post-processing
This is more or less the kind of video I expect to create

A NEW YORK MINUTE time-lapse on Vimeo

as for the soundtrack I was thinking of moby YouTube - Moby. In my heart but of course suggestions are very welcome

thanks in advance!

[OsmosisStudios]

A couple of things stand out in your example and in your project brief.

A New York Minute:
That is a rather boring Time Lapse that, as far as Im concerned, actually looks like just sped up video. If it isnt, it was basically just a bunch of shots taken at 2fps.

Your Project
Panning in time lapse is HARD. it takes some pretty touchy equipment or some heavy-duty know how.
If youre going to edit your images with any kind of post processing, then make sure you apply the processing to ALL pictures in the same way.

Doing a time lapse is easy enough, just make sure you're setting your shots either in Manual or Aperture priority to ensure a consistent exposure.

[josealb]

Originally Posted by OsmosisStudios

A couple of things stand out in your example and in your project brief.

A New York Minute:
That is a rather boring Time Lapse that, as far as Im concerned, actually looks like just sped up video. If it isnt, it was basically just a bunch of shots taken at 2fps.

Your Project
Panning in time lapse is HARD. it takes some pretty touchy equipment or some heavy-duty know how.
If youre going to edit your images with any kind of post processing, then make sure you apply the processing to ALL pictures in the same way.

Doing a time lapse is easy enough, just make sure you're setting your shots either in Manual or Aperture priority to ensure a consistent exposure.

I'm not going to do the panning in time lapse, although it could be interesting I've got a telescope tripod I could program to keep rotating for an hour or so..
If you say new york minute is rather boring, how would you make it more interesting? Maybe make it last longer so that you could see the sun move and the lighting change?
I didn't remember having to use manual mode for consistent exposure. Is exposure also consistent on Aperture priority?

Thanks for your tips

[OsmosisStudios]

The New York Minute video was very static. The camera doesnt move (only once), there's no editing. I understand the concept is to show what happens in Times Square over the course of time, but it could have been better executed. Different shots, with creative editing would be nice.

As for exposure: Manual exposure ensures a constant exposure level. Aperture priority is generally consistent, but over the course of a time lapse it can vary. If youve ever seen a time lapse where the exposure jumps around a bit, that's one of the semi-automated modes like S and A.

[josealb]

Ok I'll set it up in manual exposure, I'm a bit afraid not to get it right though when the light starts to change.

About the panning. I think adobe After effects allows you a bit of post-processing panning.

I've been thinking more about it and I'll be recording scenes that represent different values that are important in college with both time-lapse and normal recording. I hope de D5000 performs well

[Photosbykev]

This panning timelapse was shot very recently with a panning head.

Cemaes Bay Timelapse - Final on Vimeo

One thousand nine hundred and fifty 0.3 second exposures taken every 4 seconds for over 2 hours. The camera is mounted on a motorised pan/tilt head running at x1 sideral rate (15 degrees/hour).

The Canon 7D camera was connected to a laptop running DSLR Remote Pro which controlled the camera and downloaded the photographs to the hard drive. After 1,950 exposures the camera battery was only down to 40% capacity.

For the final sequence a 2 stop graduated Neutral Density filter and polarising filter were used to allow a longer shutter speed of 0.3sec @ f22 iso 100.

A few tips I've picked up are:

1. drag the shutter: You need to use fairly long exposures so there is a touch of motion blur on each frame this helps blend the pictures together.

2. don't use Av mode as the flicker is horrible. Using manual mode and manual focus.

3. On some cameras it is possible to select DoF preview mode and then slightly turn the lens in the mount to disconnect the electronics. This means the aperture is always constant.

4. Try to shoot in RAW at a size just larger than 1920x1080 and process the files to JPG and then crop to the format you want in Photoshop. This will give you max adjustment over the exposure but whatever you apply to one frame must be applied to all of them

In the video above I knew the light was going to increase so I best guessed what would be the average and used that for the whole video.