Post by howie1 on Jun 12, 2016 3:19:35 GMT
Saw a timelapse with the Isaw Edge (Go Pro style camera) and thought this timelapse stuff looks interesting. I am aiming for an eventual full days timelapse going right through into night time and right through the night with the Milky Way in full glory. Obviously to do that a wide range of ISO/Exp times and processing are needed in order to cope with the dynamic range of that transition. But that's the aim.
So I discounted the Isaw as Rick, who owns a GoPro, said it wouldnt do the night stuff too well from his experience in trying that. Plus no-one seems to have done any serious timelapse Milky Way stuff yet with the Isaw. So being an impatient sod, and not really wanting to spend $250 to find it doesnt do it, I asked the obvious question of how can I use my trusty ol' Canon EOS to make a timelapse?
I discovered the free software called StarTrails will do that. I also found out that it is REALLY easy to use. All you have to do is take your shots, open StarTrails and use its 'Open' option to navigate to all your single frames, select them all to import them into StarTrails, then click 'Make Video'. Done. (As an aside, apparently you do similar for creating star trails by taking heaps of short exposures then importing them all into the program and clicking 'Make Startrail'. It combines them all with a 'burring' value which 'blends' the shots into a star trail single image. Will have to try that sometime!)
The trick in creating timelapse is how to take the single frames! There's always a trick isn't there! Turns out from the interweb searches I did that there's multiple ways to do it. The problem is if you have anything auto in your ISO or Exp or Aperture settings, then each frame flickers as each frame tries to expose at the same constant value. But as well as the flicker, you also don't actually see the light progressively getting darker. So you have to use manual settings and leave that at that setting in order to achieve that. Or so the interweb says! So that's what I tried in my first ever go at it. Link down below.
I got two problems ... first was I used a F/1.4 50mm lens in order to grab as much light as possible but there's only a small focal plane at F/1.4 so the foreground and heaps out to the distance where I focused, is all out of focus. Second problem was that at the start, the 4pm daylight shots were slightly over exposed in order to get the dusk as much as possible when it became dark. But the dusk shots around 6pm were underexposed compaired to what my eyes saw. So next time I will have to do it in stages ... IE use the LiveView on my pc to watch the shots being taken by the Canon and as soon as I see underexposure happening, I will have to quickly stop the intervalometer and decrease the exp time by one stop then take a batch which will last 30 seconds of final video (so about 30 x 15fps worth), and check the image to see if it is still underexposed, and if so repeat until what I see in LiveView is what I see by eye. And so on and so forth. Will be fun!
Anyway, here's the first go at timelapse ...
So I discounted the Isaw as Rick, who owns a GoPro, said it wouldnt do the night stuff too well from his experience in trying that. Plus no-one seems to have done any serious timelapse Milky Way stuff yet with the Isaw. So being an impatient sod, and not really wanting to spend $250 to find it doesnt do it, I asked the obvious question of how can I use my trusty ol' Canon EOS to make a timelapse?
I discovered the free software called StarTrails will do that. I also found out that it is REALLY easy to use. All you have to do is take your shots, open StarTrails and use its 'Open' option to navigate to all your single frames, select them all to import them into StarTrails, then click 'Make Video'. Done. (As an aside, apparently you do similar for creating star trails by taking heaps of short exposures then importing them all into the program and clicking 'Make Startrail'. It combines them all with a 'burring' value which 'blends' the shots into a star trail single image. Will have to try that sometime!)
The trick in creating timelapse is how to take the single frames! There's always a trick isn't there! Turns out from the interweb searches I did that there's multiple ways to do it. The problem is if you have anything auto in your ISO or Exp or Aperture settings, then each frame flickers as each frame tries to expose at the same constant value. But as well as the flicker, you also don't actually see the light progressively getting darker. So you have to use manual settings and leave that at that setting in order to achieve that. Or so the interweb says! So that's what I tried in my first ever go at it. Link down below.
I got two problems ... first was I used a F/1.4 50mm lens in order to grab as much light as possible but there's only a small focal plane at F/1.4 so the foreground and heaps out to the distance where I focused, is all out of focus. Second problem was that at the start, the 4pm daylight shots were slightly over exposed in order to get the dusk as much as possible when it became dark. But the dusk shots around 6pm were underexposed compaired to what my eyes saw. So next time I will have to do it in stages ... IE use the LiveView on my pc to watch the shots being taken by the Canon and as soon as I see underexposure happening, I will have to quickly stop the intervalometer and decrease the exp time by one stop then take a batch which will last 30 seconds of final video (so about 30 x 15fps worth), and check the image to see if it is still underexposed, and if so repeat until what I see in LiveView is what I see by eye. And so on and so forth. Will be fun!
Anyway, here's the first go at timelapse ...