Monday, May 31, 2010

Clouds in Timelapse

This was just a quick test for an upcoming project in which I needed to test a number of things for a successful timelapse of clouds. I had already done several timelapses with both the Canon 5D Mark 2 and the Canon 7D cameras, but found that Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 bogged down (with my PC system) in processing them. My workaround then was to use Lightroom to downsize the individual photos to 1080 in height, but of course you're effectively reducing the overall resolution and negating in large part the reason you're using such high end dslr's in the first place.

I have the disks for Adobe's Production Premium CS5 on order, but for the time being I've been finding the 30-day trial version to be working admirably well on my computer system (i7 CPU 920 @ 2.67HZ, 12G DDR3 RAM, Nvidia GTX 285 vid card). The Mercury GPU engine makes full use of the CUDA capabilities of this video card and it shows (compared to the otherwise excellent CS4 version). The only thing missing from the trial version of PP CS5 are some licensed MPEG presets for my Canon .MOV clips (although there are ways of working around that -- leave a comment below if you need further info).

Here's the clip (sorry for the brevity....it WAS only a test!):


Clouds -- timelapse quick test from David Rilstone on Vimeo.



Also, Premiere Pro CS5 is apparently very forgiving in mixing up codecs and even frame rates, so I'm looking forward to working with several different cameras within one project. For the short time I've been using Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.....I LIKE IT!

This timelapse was taken two days later from my backyard using a Canon 7D and a Canon 24-70mm L lens:


Approaching Storm from David Rilstone on Vimeo.



The Canon was set to Aperture Priority at f/22, and ISO at 100, with the photo interval set at 2 seconds. Post processing was first done in Lightroom 2.7 where the original large .jpeg size was retained and the file name of each photo was changed to a sequential number. These sequentially-numbered photos were then imported into Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 and rendered into a 30 fps (29.97) MP4 clip. Unlike PP CS4, Premiere Pro CS5 can handle the full-sized .jpg photos from the Canon 7D, although preview and scrubbing is not smooth with my system. It took about 3 hours for Media Encoder to transcode into 1920 x 1080 MP4 for just over a minute of play.

Music was "The Chase" by Kevin MacLeod.

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