Light Trails

[Howard Buksbaum]

I'm need some advice on how to achieve a certain effect. The camera will be mounted to a car moving through a city or on a highway, at night. I want the lights to streak. Almost like what you would get from a long exposure in still photography.

Shooting with the Epic.

Any suggestions and / or reference?

Thanks,
Howe

[Phil Holland]

Long exposure in motion photography. Set your Epic to 1 second exposure at 1fps, make sure you black shade at those settings, hit record.

Put the camera up on your dashboard one evening and do a quick test to make sure that works out for you.

[Howard Buksbaum]

Thanks for the quick response. I'm going to try it.

[Marc Wielage]

Streaky, trailing after-images are also something you can add in post. There's a few settings within Baselight that I know will do this. Haven't tried it with DaVinci Resolve.

The advantage of doing it in post is: you can always change, diminish, or increase the effect as needed. If you shoot it that way, it's baked-in forever.

[Howard Buksbaum]

Okay, great. I'll add that to the list of experiments. Thanks.

[Andrew Gentle]

Hi Howard,

I had an idea to try and achieve this in post by stacking consecutive frames. For example, set the camera at 1 fps, 1 second/360° shutter and then stack five frames in a row using some blending mode which gave an accurate result (Add? Screen? Lighter colour?) . You could stack five frames and discard the next five to achieve a 180° shutter look. I was meaning to try it out in After Effects but never got around to it, if you try anything like it please let me know how it went!

-Andrew