Time Lapse Questions

Fwilly

Fwilly

Hey guys I love to watch time lapses and have tried recently to make my own but I run into a couple of problems. So problem one: where to focus. So in my previous time lapses I tried taking some time lapses of a thunderstorm which didn't work out so well because you couldn't even tell it was raining. So how do I focus on rain? Problem two: How to set the time metering thing. So I used a time metering thing i think its called where it takes a photo every couple of seconds. problem is I dont know how often it should be taking a picture. problem 3: where to edit it. Alright so my normal program is Sony Vegas which if I could import JPEG (which my camera takes pictures in) I could use it. But I cannot import my pictures to Sony Vegas so thats out of the picture. So what program should I use and what effects/settings should I use? That's about it guys any response would be great!

- Frank
 
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To capture rain you use a flash and a fast shutter. The flash allows the rain to show up by bouncing the flash's light off of the drops. The fast shutter freezes the action. You should set your depth of field so that everything is in focus. For a free photo editing program I recommend Picasa.

http://picasa.google.com/

Don't forget to post some stills in the Stills Share thread.
 
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Easy, but it will waste a lot of tape, film, or footage. Let your camera record a few hours of footage of a rain storm from day to night or night to day where you can see the clouds move and sun move behind the clouds.

Import the footage into Sony Vegas.

Put the footage together on your time line.

Hold down on your control button on your keyboard and grab the ends of the footage and carry it a good half way in to the other end of the footage to double the speed of the video by cutting the playback time in half for each clip. The clouds will move fast enough and the sunlight will change enough where people will know they are watching a time lapse.
 
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Yeah you need light up close for rain, but time lapses rely on big movement over time. Rain is fast and random you won't see any consistent movement in a time lapse.

Where to focus? Good place to start for time lapses are landscapes. Find a nice skyline or a good cloudy day. Sunsets and sunrises are a little harder to compensate for light changes. Traffic is fun at night when you use long exposures.

How to set your intervalometer? Well that depends on your camera and what type of intervalometer you have. Try looking up a YouTube how-to or something.

I like to edit timelapses in photoshop to get their file size a little smaller before bringing it into an NLE. Set up a photoshop action that color corrects it and scales/crops/resizes down to 1920x1080 or whatever your final output is. Batch process all the images. Then in your NLE you import the final product as an image sequence and double check the frame rate!

I'm not a Vegas user, but I'd be supposed if it couldn't import an image sequence.
 
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