Timelapse Photography

This time lapse photography reel by 599 productions is pretty insane (as in awesome)! The city footage at 3:15 is particularly amazing. I contacted the photographer with a few technical questions and he (Andrew Walker) was super cool to answer them. I thought you might enjoy our conversation, so here you go...

[ME]
Hey Andrew,
Just checked out Timelapse #5.  Awesome work man!  Really stellar.  
I've got a few "how to" questions for you:


1) How many shots per minute are you shooting?
2) What's the best way to put something like this together (Final cut?).  Have you experimented with different final frame rates? Is the #5 video 10 fps or so? 
Thanks in advance and keep doing great work!   -Kevin


[ANDREW]
All the videos I post are at 24fps, just like film. But that is just the playback frame rate. The capture frame rate varies from shot to shot. The shots range from .5sec to 15sec intervals. So far the best way I have found to do the post processing on this is to use Lightroom and FCP. I have tried After Effects and you could do everything in that program and then some. But I have had nothing but problems outputting from it.  Glad you liked the footage. I'm planning for a slightly longer video that will have my best of stuff in there. But that's a couple months away.


[ME]
Thanks for the reply Andrew.  For your night shots, what are you finding is the limit on ISO with the 5DII (or find you are shooting at most of the time)?  You have a ton of depth of field in almost all of your shots and relatively minimal noise. Are you using any noise reduction in LR? Also, in terms of file type and size, are you exporting all images from LR as Jpgs or Tifs (8bit, 16bit)? And merging into Final Cut.  Thanks for the advice.  It's really helpful.  I look forward to seeing a compilation (best of) segment. Send me a link when you post it.


[ANDREW]
The ISO for the night shots vary from 200-250 for the cityscape stuff and 3200 for all the star timelapse. But I have used around 400 for some city stuff, you just need to find a good balance. For the shots that have the high ISOs I am using some noise reduction in Lightroom. All the images are resized to 1920x1080 16-bit Tiffs. I use to do 8-bit for all my stuff but I found that 16-bit handles the gradients better. Then after the output I import the frames into FCP and have it assemble the frames.
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Park City Photographers

Utah Photographers