I definitely went a bit hard on auto exposure there, and while I wouldn’t recommend it, I will say it’s not all that bad in some situations. Auto modes are the main culprit for flicker in time lapses and should be avoided whenever possible. The best way to do this is to lock down your camera’s settings in manual mode and not to touch them after the time lapse begins. Just be careful to leave enough latitude to work with in your NLE or color grading application. You’ll want to avoid this at all costs because editing flickering footage is not a good solution.Ī fixed manual exposure can guarantee smooth transitions when light is changing. This is very noticeable and is extremely distracting. Tips for smooth time lapses in this case refer to how you should manage your exposures during shooting to avoid flickering.įlickering refers to sudden brightness changes in a time lapse, where individual frames have dramatically different exposures from the surrounding frames. The guidelines above have mostly dictated your settings and then basic photography things like keeping as low an ISO as possible are straightforward. Keep Exposure Consistentīy this point in the project, there isn’t much more to work with. The rule is a good starting point, but it isn’t absolute. Or maybe you want a bit more crispness in the final take of a rocky landscape and there isn’t much foliage to worry about, so shutter speed matters less. Astrophotography with longer shutters might create star trails, which may or may not be desired. Now, I will say that while in video you should mostly stick to the 180-degree rule unless you have good reason not to in time lapses, this is far from a hard-and-fast rule. This is more apparent if there are moving objects in your frame, such as grass or tree leaves, that might look very jumpy as wind blows them around. Why bother with a video-specific rule for a mostly still-image medium? By adding some motion blur, using longer shutter speeds, the final time lapse can look a lot smoother and more natural, especially if this clip is going to cut with other conventional video. Getting nice, smooth footage is easy if you can follow the 180-degree shutter rule. Now that we are used to this look after decades of movie watching, it’s hard to break even if directors like Peter Jackson want to try new things. This goes back to the days of motion picture film cameras and how their shutter mechanisms operated. This is gospel for videographers and filmmakers because it helps them get the “cinema look” where the action has a just-right amount of motion blur. Let’s look at the 180-degree shutter rule. Divide the time you plan to spend shooting by the total number of photos to figure out your interval (time between shots).Multiply frame rate by target clip length (in seconds) to determine the number of photos you need to take.Know your target frame rate-24 fps is always a safe bet.Adding some time onto the end or starting early are good plans. You can shoot more open-ended time lapses, but it’s good to have a basic idea of how long you plan to be out or let your camera run. Knowing how long you intend to shoot your subject will let you divide that time by the number of frames to get your interval between photos. However, it does take up a lot of storage space when you start shooting for 24 fps. Capturing the highest-quality image is recommended because you can pull out more detail and color. These days practically anything will work but, for a film production/cinematic look, you’ll want to go with 24p-and for TV you’ll want 30p.Ī single frame from the above gif. Those numbers indicate how many frames are being played for each second of footage. This is how many frames per second at which the video is intended to play, commonly referred to in figures such as 24p, 30p, and 60p (25p and 50p for our PAL friends). This means the final frame rate of your exported video, once all is said and done. The most crucial part of this calculation is the frame rate. You’ll want to figure out how many photos you need to take to get the clip length you want. I hate to break it to you, but digital imaging runs on math and you’ll need to do a bit more to master time lapses. Many of my good friends claim to have gotten into the arts-like photography-because they either disliked or were bad at math.
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