So, I’m not particularly proud of this video simply because it is the first time-lapse I’ve ever done. I was shooting pictures at a Relay for Life event in Cedar City. As I watched people walk around the track, I thought, “this would make a cool time-lapse video.” I setup the camera on a tripod, took a few minutes to figure out the interval timer settings and let’er rip.
If technical details bore you, then read no further.
How It Was Shot
I went into the camera’s interval timer settings and set it to take one shot every second for 1,000 shots. That would translate into about 3GB of JPG Fine shots on a 4GB card. That also means it was shooting for about 16 minutes.
I was using my 18-200mm VR lens and the biggest lesson I learned was that I should have turned VR off. The camera was on a tripod, so there was no need for VR and I think having VR on is responsible for the image shifting you see in the video.
The location I setup the camera at was in the shade. I wanted some depth of field, but I also needed to keep the shutter speed fast enough to not completely blur people. That meant 1/60th @ f/5.6, ISO 200. I could have bumped the ISO up to get a faster shutter speed and in retrospect, I probably should have. The people are just not quite sharp enough at 1/60th of a second. I actually also which I would have shot in JPG normal resolution so that I could get more shots at 2 or 3 frames per second. That just means that in the same time period I would have shot 2 or 3 thousand images. That would have made a smoother time-lapse video.
Post production was done in iMovie. Nothing fancy. It lets you import photos from iPhoto, which I don’t normally use. I had to export them from Lightroom, then import them into iPhoto and then add them to the video in iMovie. By default iMovie applies a panning type action to every photo and displays each photo 2 seconds. I changed that to display each photo for 0.2 seconds and removed the panning action. I also cropped the images slightly in iMovie to conform to a 16:9 aspect ratio.
The music is a royalty free track that I bought from iStockphoto. It is really tempting to just add a song I like from my library. In fact I had a song that I thought worked really well, but I decided to be a good boy and get a royalty free song instead.
It was a fun exercise. Now I want to do more time-lapse stuff.