Approaching Storm

This evening I chanced to look out the kitchen window to see the approach of rather dramatic-looking thunderheads. We were in a "Severe Thunderstorm Advisory" according to the local TV Weather Channel, so I took the opportunity to grab my ol' trusty Canon 40D, plug in a Canon intervalometer, and set it up on a tripod in my backyard to face the oncoming storm.

Passing Clouds from David Rilstone on Vimeo.

The lens used was a Canon 17-40mm f/4.0 L lens. Setting the focus to "manual", it was easy to hand-adjust by using the liveview feature with its multiplier of x5 and x10. I selected Aperture Priority @ f/4 and a relatively high ISO of 400 to give me reasonably quick shutter times in view of the coming sunset. The first sequence I chose an interval of 15 seconds, the second sequence had an interval of 5 seconds. (Next time I'll opt for an interval of one second - more on this later).

I've found I get the best results shooting these sequences using "Small .jpg" and "Landscape" picture style. The small .jpg's are already close to 1920 x 1080, which is what I wanted the final video resolution to be. I then imported this series of photos from the CF card to my hard drive using Lightroom 2.7. Upon quickly examining the photos for any obvious rejects, I then exported them to a separate folder -- Lightroom has the phenomenal ability to rename each photo in turn by sequence number ie. ".001" and upwards -- this makes it easy for your NLE (non-linear editing) program to import each photo in correct order to produce a timelapse film.

In this case, I used Adobe Premiere Pro CS5. When rendering this video clip to 24 frames per second, I found that the cloud action was much too fast, hence I reduced the overall speed to 75% -- which is an improvement but looks slightly choppy. As mentioned above, next time I will take photos at one second intervals to give me a slower, smoother cloud action.

For this timelapse, I dusted off the 40D since my 5D Mark 2 and 7D have been heavily pressed into video service of late. Timelapse sequences are a great use for the older camera models (ie. 20D, 30D) since these cameras accept the same intervalometer as the more recent 50D, 7D, and 5D Mark 2 and will likewise give fantastic resolution in the end result.

The music is "The Chase" by Kevin MacLeod.

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.

Death Trap Lawnmower

Actually a timelapse of yours truly mowing the lawn this afternoon.

Lawnmower Death Trap from David Rilstone on Vimeo.

This timelapse was taken with a Canon 7D using a 17-40mm L lens (set at 17mm) with a Canon intervalometer set at 1 second intervals. I chose to set this camera on Aperture Priority at f16 and ISO 160. This was a bright, sunny day so f16 gave me sufficient Depth of Field with this lens to keep everything in focus along with a reasonable shutter speed to freeze the action. Approximately 1000 frames were shot at small .jpg, then batch resized to 1080 height using Lightroom 2.7. This was my first timelapse used with Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 (Trial Version -- full version on order!). I set the framespeed to 30 (29.97) fps, and added "Born to Run" for a little mood. :)