Newbie advice for Time Lapse movie

mlawrence

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Hello all. I've been in IT for over 20 years, but I'm new at photography.

My boss has tasked me with creating a time lapse movie of our site construction over the next 18 months, day and night. He would like the resultant video to be about 3 minutes long. He'd like the video to be 30fps.

So, 30 frames each second for 180 seconds would be 5,400 pictures. Over a period of 18 months, that works out to about one picture every 2 hours.

The thing I am confused about is the exposure/shutter speed. From what I read on Wikipedia, "In long exposure time-lapse, the exposure time will approximate the effects of a normal shutter angle. Normally, this means the exposure time should be half of the frame interval." I really don't think I would need to keep the shutter open for an hour! to get a smooth looking video.

Can anyone help with some advice?

Martin Lawrence
 
Hey Martin,

Wikipedia has it correct, but you don't have to create it as an ideal video. Get your automatic exposure and let that run, the video will run a bit staccato but it will work.

The big problem is you would have to get some serious ND filters to get the exposure for the daytime down to about an hour, and you would have to remove or reduce the ND filter level for night shots. On top of all that, the noise level from the sensor would probably be quite intense.

Some suggestions I would make:

- keep the video at the ideal exposure, but set your f-stop to about f/22 and your ISO to 100 so you can get the longest shutter speeds and get some blur when things are moving.
- set up an interval of half an hour and capture a lot more... Then you can segment daytime shots, night time shots, choose important points in time and edit the time-lapse together. You can always speed it up later in post to make a full time-lapse, but it won't be nearly as interesting as an edited sequence.
- get a second camera for recording some special moment sequences either at real-time or shorter intervals as highlights.

The first idea of just letting the camera capture one frame every two hours will be interesting, but with the day/night changes happening then at twice a second will most likely make the video intolerable to watch with the crazy flickering between day and night.
 

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