My love of time-lapse meshes perfectly with my love of, well, the 5 foot carpet python I share my house with. Having a companion animal (is it politically correct to say “pet” these days?) around is great for any visual artist. More specifically, having Python around an HD, slow-motion capable video camera, well I think that’s a fantastic combination:

I am yet to create any actual “HD” material with this camera, but for web-resolution work it has been an absolute revelation. The ability to shoot a show as a single wide shot from a tripod and then pan and scan in post production means that those previously unexciting “gig documentation” tapes are now actually worth editing. Similarly, if you’re shooting hand-held HD but delivering web resolution you have huge latitude for image stabilization.

For the python dinner I had a couple of DV cameras as backup angles, and the difference in detail is frightening.

We’re all about the cheap, characterful, DIY aesthetic here at CDMo, but sometimes bigger really is better.

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.

I’ve had 2 rented Draper Cinefold screens with me on the tour. These are relatively expensive collapsible screens which we got a good deal on for a 3ish month rental. Unfortunately their former life at dance parties outside in the elements had left them with some pretty serious battle scars. One of the screen frames had a broken hinge, as did one of the legs.

These I “fixed” with gaffer tape and strips of plywood, until we had a couple of days off between tour legs and I time for some maintenance. I realised that while the screens came with drape bars to hang blacks from, they had never been used as the drapes are an extra US$1000ish, and not really required for raves out in the bush.

It was a relatively quick fix to dremel off the rivet heads from the broken and fresh hinges and to bolt the new ones in place. Requires some 6mm bolts, washers, and some nyloc nuts if you want to be extra sure that they’re not going to work their way free as the kit vibrates its way around the country in the back of a truck.

I shot a timelapse of the fix. Not really as a tutorial, as it’s not really something which requires much explanation. More as a celebration of my return to civilization, where I can waste a couple of hours shooting and motion tracking a mundane exercise.

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.

If you read websites on the interwebs I’m sure you’ve encountered the phenomenon of “High Dynamic Range” photography, or HDR as it’s affectionately known. It’s not a new thing, the HDR Flickr Group contains over 50,000 images. I’ve had “Make with the HDR, then make the HDR timelapse” on my potential projects list for a while now, and was reminded of such when I encountered this video yesterday:

Pretty! So I asked HDRSoft for a review copy of Photomatix Pro, and took a whole lot of differently-exposed pictures of the closest thing I had to hand, my desk:

HD4Indies’ Mike points out the Canon HV20 “Compact HDV Camcorder”. It’s has an HD (1920×1080p) CMOS sensor, records HDV to DV tapes, and sports an HDMI out for uncompressed capture.

Mike likes the look of it for a “learner camera”, to me this looks like an ideal unit for tethered shooting of visuals, studio shoots and time lapse requiring frame rates faster than an SLR can deliver. I’m starting to spec out a tour rig at the moment, this looks ideal for throwing in a backpack - I’ll let the film crews lug around the big heavy cameras.