I'm preparing to shoot a time-lapse clip with my XL1s. I know the dance-steps to set this up but have never tried this feature. If you've already tried this, can you offer me any advice or tips beforehand?

Thanks very much.

What are you shooting? Available light outside? For how long?

I've done a little bit of work with it & have been a little disappointed. It's good for ice forming or something like that, but for clouds, city scenes or even a butterfly hatching it's too choppy. Of course that in itself has some applications. For thunderheads & such, it's much better to just burn an hour of tape.

Chris

I've done it with clouds (quite a few years ago) and it was good enough I used it in my demo reel as a background. Good time lapse is really just persistence. I tried different FPS based on the captured images and then the speed of the clouds would change. It took me probably 6 to 8 tries to get a really smooth cloud segment.

Jeff

You guys aren't talking about interval mode, right? Something different?

Ken,
Check out this time lapse footage shot with the XL-1. I rolled for 30 minutes and then loaded into Premiere and bumped the clip speed up to 10,000 percent (the maximum). That wasn't fast enough to make the clouds roll like I wanted. I then composited the 10K footage and bumped it up another few hundred or so and finally got what I wanted. At these speed changes, 30 minutes condenses down to about 4-5 seconds and of course they can be looped with a slight seamless dissolve.

Time Lapse Footage:

(high speed)
198.65.158.133/romeskylines/ROMESKYLINES300K.asx

Commercials with Time Lapse: Look for Expo Big Screen & Heritage Rome spots

www.jefcommunications.com/commercials.html

James,

Top link doesn't work (at least on a Mac w/IE). Bottom link returns page not found.

Jeff

Top link gave me file not found then I hit F5 (refresh) and it played in windows media player (winXP/IE 6.026).
Some segments are better than others (just due to the available lighting) The second segment is really pretty and sort of creepy feel to it.

Very nice

Link 2 gave me
The page cannot be found
The page you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable.


Marc

Found it

http://www.jefcommunications.com/Commercial.html

Drop the s off of the web page name

Commercial not commercials

I don't know why, but Mac users aren't able to watch these files very successfully. Thanks Marc for correcting the jefcom link. Here are corrected links below.

(high speed)
198.65.158.133/romeskylines/ROMESKYLINES300K.asx


Commercials with Time Lapse: Look for Expo Big Screen & Heritage Rome spots

www.jefcommunications.com/commercial.html

Chris: Yes, I'm shooting an indoor scene with natural lighting (from large windows) augmented with a panel of Lowell flourescents. Total length of shoot: approx. 3 hrs. I'm considering snapping 2 secs. every 3 minutes leaving me with a total of approximately 2 minutes of coverage.

Josh: Yes, this is "interval mode" shooting.

James: Nice examples (and nice commercial spots). Thanks very much for the details.

The XL1s only does 30 sec, 1 min, 5 min... I don't think that you can do a 3 min interval. What are you trying to shoot, the light from the window moving across the room?
Think of time-lapse like a math equation, the shortest interval with the shortest exposure gives you the smoothest footage. Ideally it would be much better if we could choose one frame per sec, per 2 sec, 5 sec etc.

For your shoot (2 sec every 3 min) a 1/2 sec every 30 sec would give you 3 sec every 3 min but it would be spaced more evenly, so if you want a smoother look to it, use the shortest exposure with the shortest interval.

Good shooting! It's nice to be able to shoot indoors. All of my stuff is outside.

Chris

James,

Thanks for posting your examples. Nice work. I have some questions regarding the commercials...

1. what titling software do you use?
2. are you simply using short white slates to add the transition flashes?
3. how did you do the transition that intercuts two segments really fast?

John,

I use a CG called Inscriber CG. It came bundled the with Matrox Digisuite package

The white flashes are simply a white color matte that are about 4-6 frames long and fade out to the video underneath

What spot are you referring to with the transition that intercuts two segments really fast?

James,

It's from the Rome Expo big screen commercial...looks like about 41 seconds into it.

Well there are two around that time. One is simply a sped up telephoto pan of the floor shot just for that purpose and the other seems to be about 5-10 4 frame shots back to back.

Thanks for the info, James. Again...nice work.