This is something I’ve been working on for quite a while, but I’ve realised that there are too many new things on the horizon which will take up my time (and my computers’ CPU cycles) so I’ve decided to release it as a draft rather than sitting on it until "perfect".

While there’s still some editing and motion tweaking to be done, this piece is rather time consuming to preview and render. As the action speeds up it is blending many high resolution images together for each frame.

The video compresses around 10 hours of stencil cutting into 4 minutes. Shot with the same Pentax *ist DS as my previous time lapse efforts, the camera takes around 35 frames per minute at 1536×1024. This gives plenty of leeway for pan and scan in post production if outputting to SD or lower resolutions.

This method of shooting allows a very high quality look, with minimal expenditure. I had some problems with this camera’s viewfinder focus and auto-aperture function recently, the repair quote was AU$300, while a new K100D (the new version of the *ist) is under AU$600 including a lens. With prices for digital SLRs getting this low, a proper SLR version of the ghetto timeslice rig can’t be too far away.

Peter keeps pestering me to post this video, so here you go:

Red Iceblock Melting Outside Timelapse.

This was shot in my Pentax *ist DS, with an old, beat-up, 50mm F1.4 lens I picked up in Vietnam. The “intervalometer” in this case is even more ghetto than the electronics kit I put together a year ago. It’s a 2.5mm stereo mini jack with the cable release side soldered to ground. Plugging this in makes the camera think the shutter is held down constantly. Put the camera in “burst” shooting mode and it will happily fire off a frame every ~1.7 seconds until it runs out of battery or SD card space. Drop the resulting series of JPGs into a folder, import as footage into After Effects, resize, crop, done. Pretty timelapse.

The actual shooting of this was similarly simple: The popcicle stick was attached to the tripod of a dual-500W work light with a strong magnet. 1000W of lights are sitting just out of shot, accellerating the melting process.

Advantages of this method: This is a relatively cheap way to get extremely high quality source material. The resulting video is natively 3000×2000 pixels, and shot on a camera and lens which would cost well under US$1000.

Disadvantages: I’m not sure how much of this treatment the shutter of an SLR is designed to take. Fortunately Digi SLRs are generally more professional gear, so they should be able to take a reasonable amount of punishment, and plenty of professional shooters will snap off thousands of images in a day, they’re just not quite holding the shutter down constantly for 45 minutes. I’ve used the camera on probably 20-30 of these shoots, rolled over the shot counter several times, and haven’t seen any smoke or blue sparks yet, so hopefully it will continue to work out.

Exciting things are afoot. As hinted, I’ll be Visualisting my way around the country soon. Touring Australia = Large chunks of time sitting on a bus, so when that hits I expect to be a veritable fountain of CDMotion content (including some of that hot new NAMM gear, stay tuned), but until then it looks like things are going to be a little… cramped? I don’t expect to have much time to devote to devote to the extensive, handcrafted editorialising we’re all used to.

Which is a problem, as I have loads of awesome stuff to tell you about, and it just can’t wait two months. So my plan is to do a series of Pocket Reviews, getting all of the salient points (which are quite easy to write) without the filler (which takes time to get right).

First up: My Russian Spy Lens - the Zenitar 16mm Fish Eye - arrived today.

US$150 including shipping from East Wave BestOptics. I’m using it on my Pentax *ist DS. The Digital SLR Focal Length Multiplier is 1.5, so it’s probably closer to a 24mm lens on this camera, but still gives a beautifully wide view angle, and plenty of lens distortion.