Timelapse Questions...Kelly anybody?

epirb wrote on 12/29/2004, 11:45 AM

I took some footage of sunsets and fog evaporating over a river, and plan time speed up the clips.
I was planing on using the time bandit script in my Veggie toolkit.
my question is ,I know Kelly has a few timelapses under his belt, should I do color corr on the full length clip beforehand or after... and also should I use any other filters like a motion blurr or something?
I'm really pretty green at time lapse stuff.
any and all suggestions would be appreciated.

Comments

jetdv wrote on 12/29/2004, 12:30 PM

If you want multiple events changed the same, you could apply it to the TRACK instead of the EVENT. Or you could apply it to the event, copy that event, and then "Paste Event Attributes". Or you could apply it to the media in the Media Pool.

Chienworks wrote on 12/29/2004, 1:11 PM

It really shouldn't make any difference to the output if you color correct before or after. However, if your original is, say, 30 minutes long and the finished version is 30 seconds, then color correcting beforehand will take 60 times as long as doing it afterwards. Therefore i definately vote for afterwards!

I experimented with various amounts of motion blur and didn't really find anything that helped much with the material i was using. Clouds are soft enough to begin with that the motion still flowed pretty well. I even disabled resampling to speed up the process and it looked fine. There is a limit to how much you can speed things up though. I found with the clouds going by that 120x to 200x looked good. 600x looked way too choppy and all the fluidity of motion was gone. If you speed it up too much the image jumps too far each frame and it ends up looking disjointed. This will depend a lot on your original material.

epirb wrote on 12/29/2004, 2:21 PM

Thanks Ed and Kelly,
Thats makes sense , re: doing the correction afterwards would definatley be much faster.
I'll try and post my results and maybe you guys can tell me where I could use improvement.

scissorfighter wrote on 12/29/2004, 2:37 PM

Good suggestions about speed, but don't forget to take into account the wind! For example, shooting clouds at x200 looks great on a relatively calm day, but if it's windy and the clouds are moving fast, speeds as low as x60 are nice. Same applies to everything else, like Chienworks said, it will depend on your original subject and your intended use of the resulting footage.

I use Scenalyzer and a laptop to capture timelapse in the field all the time, along with an 18-hour portable battery power supply. Saves a lot of tape and wear and tear on the camera, and makes for short work back at the shop becuase you don't have to digitize the footage and it's already timelapsed. When using Scenalyzer like this is best to err on the side of "too much" footage and capture at a slower rate than you think might be ideal, which will give you some headroom to speed it up in Vegas if necessary. If you shoot "too little" footage, and capture at too high a rate, you can't slow it down without interpolating frames.

Ryan