Creativity to Spare

There are several ways to do Time Lapse Photography, my favorite involves using a Digital Still Camera and a controller. Once the photos are taken, I demonstrate how to to stitch the photos together into a finished movie. You could also use a Digital Video Camera with controlling software to do Time Lapse.

You will need a digital still camera, a Tripod or other alternative, And it will help if you have software within the camera menus or as a separate program in a computer to control the timing/interval. I use a Nikon D-100 (I just realized I said the wrong thing in the video / I was talking into a Canon doing a handheld self interview, oops). I purchased for my camera a Controller called the MC-36 also from Nikon. It will let me set an interval and also set delays and how many pictures up to 999 or until I stop it. This is a much better solution than I used to use. You can manually control this by pressing the shutter button or use some other remote cable, but it will be long and difficult to keep the timing even. My friend Victor has done this method and I have seen some other stop motion animations which are similar to time lapse.

My previous rig was a Laptop with Nikon Capture Control software. It had it’s benefits, like being able to see how the shots were turning out as they went and also remote control of all the camera functions such as Aperture, Shutter Speed, ISO and when should it focus. But it had a few big problems, one was hauling around a laptop and leaving it attached during the whole shoot. The battery life of the laptop could also be problematic. The other major problem was in that the camera had to download each photo down slow old USB 1.1 to the computer. This would add a lag in the sequence.

The advantages of the new rig is portability, battery life, and no lag in the sequence, it will store right to the memory card and as long as the camera buffer can keep up with the rate. I’ve tested it down to 1-fps(the quickest rate on the controller) and it did fine with fully charged batteries at Normal quality and Small picture size. If I increase the quality I would have to slow the rate.

There are many new cameras that have Time Lapse built in. The Nikon D-200 and several of the smaller Point and Shoot Nikon Cool Pix cameras and Canons. I would prefer having all the individual frames instead of having the camera stitch the movie into a .MPG for me, which is something a few new cameras might do. What the feature might be called is just Interval. Having the individual frames will allow you to choose the size of the output movie up to a very High Definition size depending on the Megapixels of the camera. Also you can select the Frame Rate: Movies are shot at 24 Frames Per Second and Video is at 29.97 FPS.

Once you transfer the images into your computer into a separate folder, you will need QuickTime Pro. Which is $29.99 for Mac OSX. Once in there you will go to file and open image sequence. Select the first image in the sequence, and the FPS. You might not be able to play back the resulting file smoothly depending on it’s size and how fast your hard drive is. Don’t worry, you now will select export quicktime movie and select the Codec. The selection will depend on what you want to do with the footage, if you are bringing it into another editor than you may want to match the quality and codec of any other footage. Now you can open and play the finished exported file.

Another route to go is with a Digital Video Camera and controlling software. I tested out Boinx Software’s iStopMotion for Mac OSX. You can try the program out with a free 1 week license on their site. It worked fairly well. I’m disappointed at the huge price jump for High Definition output. It goes from $49 for Standard Definition to $499 for HD. And the quality of the sensor in most Video camera’s can’t match a Digital SLR. But in good lighting it is fine. The program really shines for Stop Motion animation which is something I’m going to explore sometime in the future.
For Windows you could try Stop Motion Pro which is also available with a free trial.

Here are some more resources for those interested in really pro rigs.
The Mumford Time Machine
Harbortronics high end controllers

And here is a music video done with my D-100, QuickTime Pro, and Final Cut.

Continuing on with budget lighting, we explore using Fluorescent and LED lights, along with using available light, bouncing it with a reflector. These setups will work great for interviews, video casting, vlogging, and the like. These lights use less power and also generate much less heat then big halogen work lights. And the price can’t be beat. We also show the benefits of adjusting White Balance on your camera, with lots of before and after shots. If you are shooting independent movies, stay tuned at the end where we show lighting for shots using the interior of a car.

The LED lights are from Costco and are the LUMEN brand item#170530- 2 Wireless LED under cabinet lights for $12.95. They also come with 6 Duracell AAA batteries in the package. I just taped them together for the cast, but I plan on buying some more and modding them to be a panel with 40 LEDs or so.

The Fluorescent lights are from a suggestion I saw from Walter Graff, who mentioned buying inexpensive Flo’s for interview lighting. I bought 2 Utilitech 18″ Under Cabinet Lights for $8.95 each, from Lowe’s Item#240193. And for mounting I bought a 5 Tool Holder for the garage, the type for holding brooms and rakes. I cut the metal strip into 5 pieces, attached them to the back of the lights in a temporary fashion using Velcro and used the 5 clamps to snap around very inexpensive mic stands. It works great.

So we had an interesting weekend here at the Creativity to Spare studios (my house) this weekend. We entered into a short film contest where you mush complete a movie in 24 hours from concept to final edit. It was for the A3F (Almost Famous Film Festival) here in Phoenix, AZ.
At 12:00 noon on Saturday the guidelines for the movie are released: The theme – A Quick Escape, Prop – A knot (someone ties/unties a knot), Line of Dialog – “I have a bad feeling about this”. By 12 noon on Sunday we had to turn in our short. We spent the first hour and half coming up with the concept and working out who was actually going to be available to act and be in our small crew. The next hour we had to figure out all the logistics of where to shot how to shoot it. Now we had 4 hours to actually get it in the can as they say, before our light ran out. Next was a short dinner and then Log and Capture in Final Cut Pro. We used 2 cameras a Panasonic DVX100B for all the A roll main footage, and my Canon ZR for B roll: shot about 45 minutes on A, and 25 minutes on B. Log and Capture took about 3 hours, a nap was taken once the computer started grabbing the A roll. Got up at 1:30 AM to start a rough edit, by 5 AM I had most of the raw edit together, KK had helped unearth some sound effects. Another short nap was taken, at 7 AM we needed to get some more sound effects so we went out to do some foley with a portable recorder; H4 from Zoom and a shotgun mic AT4073. Ingested the new audio and had to make it mono using Audacity (free simple audio editor). Finished the main edit by 9:15 AM. Sent the project into Logic Audio to do a final audio mix and add some music (hopefully). The audio import does not go as well as I wanted, and I spend 45 minutes fixing crossfades and levels. Now I have about 30 minutes for music, before I have to bounce to disk the audio as a Stereo Mix and bring it back into Final Cut Pro to output the whole thing to tape (miniDV). Oops need some titles and credits, get that done along with a name finally. We live in Chandler and the Drop Off is in Downtown Phoenix, we have planned to leave at least by 11 AM just incase of road closure or bizarre Sunday traffic. Output to tape is finished just before 11 AM and now just have to watch it on a TV to check that it plays all the way through one more time. Just after 11 we are in the car and on our way to turn it in. And we have an early lunch.
Whew.

Sorry for not having a cast this weekend I will post a new episode later this week, and hopefully another by the weekend. We will find out Friday, if we made it into the top 20 films and the screening will be on the next thursday at an AMC theatre downtown. Out of 47 teams only 32 finished in time. Wish us luck.

UPDATE-
We premiered this thursday and won for best use of Theme. Here is the movie- profanity beeped.
Enjoy