GH2 and BMPCC for shoot abroad,what to use?

Hi folks,

I have both a hacked GH2 and a Black Magic Pocket Cinema Camera along with a panny 14-45 3.5-5.6, Canon FD 50 1.4, 24 2.8 and Tamron 80-200 3.5.

Basicallly next week I travel to Santorini (greek island) with the better half and I want to get some nice reel shots.I won't be backing up any cards so basically I have one 64GB card that will shoot RAW with the BMPCC and several 64 and 32GB cards to use with the GH2, along with several batteries for both.

Basically I have one shot in particular that I really want, I'd love a really wide time-lapse of the town of Fira showing the stars in the night sky looking like they're revolving around the earth, I have seen several time lapses like this but have no concept of how to set up the cameras either for the time-lapse or to correctly expose the stars.

I am wondering whether it is best to use the BMPCC or GH2 for this, the short battery and card times on the BMPCC mean a long time-lapse would be impossible but then I don't know how to do one on the GH2.

I want several other shots but they're more standard beauty shots.

Any help is greatly appreciated folks,

Cheers.
 
You can get an external time lapse controller like this for the GH2:

http://www.amazon.com/Professional-Control-PANASONIC-MagicFiber-Microfiber/dp/B0049IOPFK

For exposure you'll probably just need to shoot some tests, you'll be using multi-second exposures (not even sure the BMPCC can do those), probably in the 10-30 second range depending on your ISO and aperture settings. Much over 30 seconds and you start getting trails rather than points from the stars.
 
Thanks IDOM, I have bought the controller. From what I can work out if I set the shutter speed to around 25 seconds in camera then set the trigger to every 30 seconds on the controller it should have enough time to buffer in-between shots?
 
That sounds like it will work, although you probably don't really need five seconds between shots - less than one second is actually typical, write time to the card isn't really a factor when you're only talking about taking one shot every few seconds. There's a lot of factors involved in the actual exposure though, so you'll really need to do some test shots on location to determine what works best.
 
Ok the controller has arrived but Im having an issue. The buffering time on the GH2 seems to be the same length as the exposure, so a 25 second shutter speed is followed by a glass timer icon saying please wait and a countdown from 25 seconds?
 
Wow, that's surprising - I haven't used the GH2 much though. So you're saying you hit the shutter button, it's opens the shutter for 25 seconds, then after the shutter closes it sits there for another 25 seconds? I can't imagine why it would do that, unless it's doing something strange internally like taking multiple shorter exposures and combining them to produce the final image.
 
With the controller can you set up a time lapse? e.g. ask it to take 50 shots with 20 second exposures?

My Gh3 does something similar where a long exposure shot will also be processed for some length of time. But it has a time lapse mode and that doesn't seem to an issue when using it. So it may just be able to do that processing in the b/g or wait till the end of the time lapse?

If not, I imagine one of the Gh2 hacks has time lapse controls?
 
There is a setting you should turn off, I think it's noise reduction. Try that and see if you can get your save time to cut way down.

edit :
Here you go.

http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/archive/index.php/t-288864.html

"Technically the long shutter noise reduction is not writing the data to the card for that extra 30 seconds. It is actually taking an additional exposure. If you shoot a long noise reduction image without a lens you will see that it actually closes the shutter during the second exposure. It is called a dark frame. It then combines the light and dark frame to get rid of the noise. Writing the information to the card does not take long at all."
 
That definitely must be what's going on. From that thread it sounds like the second noise reduction exposure improves the picture quality quite a bit, but it's just not going to be appropriate for long-exposure time lapse. As I mentioned earlier, once you get up around 30-second exposures the stars are moving enough that you start to see them as trails in the image rather than individual points. If you add another 30ish second gap between each exposure you'll probably end up with motion that stutters due to the missing time between each frame.

Personally I'd try turning off the noise reduction feature, then going out and shooting a short test locally. See if the resulting noise is a problem, and if you can remove it satisfactorily in post. If not you may have to work with shorter exposure times, which will require either higher ISOs (which may introduce more noise) or faster lens apertures, or a combination of both.
 
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