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Question about time-lapse on the red

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adam brennan

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I haven't tried yet, but how does time lapse on the Red compare to a DSLR? DSLR seems to have a better time lapse results than video cameras. Video cameras that try to do time lapse looks more like video that is being fast forwarded. How does the red do compared to a DSLR time-lapse?
 
I've been meaning to do a how to video about it for awhile, hopefully my circumstances will turn around and I'll finally get to it. Nevertheless my personal opinion is that within a certain range I find it superior to using a DSLR. Here are some quick points on why I shoot time lapses on Red for select shots..

16 bit RAW
r3d file is drag and drop no rendering
in camera playback with various speed options (2x 4x..etc)
in camera time-lapse settings
easy of use with various lenses
Foolcontrol
Not having to carry around additional cameras

Things to consider is
Power consumption - its going to use more power than a dslr. I prefer paglink batteries because you can stack them if you need more juice. Use the battery belt clip so you don't touch the camera when shooting.
Wind - if there is wind the monitor can act like a sail. I mount it upside down on the ssd side of the camera so its out of the way.

When not to shoot red for time-lapse
Astro timelapse
Long term shots
Exposures longer than a couple seconds

Hopefully I can do a comprehensive post here in the future. Feel free to PM me with questions and I'll do my best to help.
 
adam brennan said:
Video cameras that try to do time lapse looks more like video that is being fast forwarded.
Click to expand...

With Red time-lapse shots each frame is like a dslr frame but it's automatically compiled into a single r3d container. No rendering needed for playback/editing
 
Perfect! Thank you Chad! Hope to see your work soon! I am new to this Red Epic W and just got it in yesterday.
 
what is especially cool with red when time lapsing are 3 things.

1. HDRx you simply can get a short exposure whitin your exposure.
2. 360 shutter. Simply you can use this to later compile multiple frames in post to get variable exposure and speed of your clip without getting steppiness in your motion blur.
3. In camera frame suming and frame adding functions somthing not seen in many still cameras which is a great way to increase exposure times without added brightness / frame average or frame adding that increase the exposure by adding frames together.

shooting red also gives the possibility to have instant playback when done.

And the 1tb mags and compressed raw gives pretty outstanding posibilities for clip lenghts / runtime.
 
Plus 1 what Chad said but just to be clear there are some longer exposures you can do with the RED but you need to really experiment to see what the limitations are.
Personally I prefer using my RED in almost every situation for time lapse EXCEPT when shooting Astro time-lapse. And when shooting animation or stop motion the RED can almost always excel any DSLR for most tasks.https://vimeo.com/204837267
 
Russ, Astro time-lapse doesn't work well on the Red Epic W?
 
Also, the Epic-W does a 35MP still. So another advantage is that it has a higher resolution that most DSLRs out there, such as my 20MP 6D.

In terms of power, I'd imagine it wouldn't be too much of an issue because, if I'm not wrong, you can do a hotswap with a combination of the battery belt clip and a mounted battery?
 
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Homer Dulu said:
In terms of power, I'd imagine it wouldn't be too much of an issue because, if I'm not wrong, you can do a hotswap with a combination of the battery belt clip and a mounted battery?
Click to expand...

Correct you can do it that way, with a double sided belt clip, or with stackable batteries like paglinks on a belt clip. Big thing is you don't want to be pulling batteries off the back of the camera and moving it. So using an external powering solution via a long cable is key.
 
Chad Lancaster said:
Correct you can do it that way, with a double sided belt clip, or with stackable batteries like paglinks on a belt clip. Big thing is you don't want to be pulling batteries off the back of the camera and moving it. So using an external powering solution via a long cable is key.
Click to expand...

Got it. Thanks! :thumbup:
 
I've done a fair bit of timelapse with my A7R (36 megapixels) as well as a few with my Epic-W... it's IMO quite a bit easier with the Epic; with the Sony, the post part of it is a bit of a bear. I ended up having to ingest the footage into MambaFX to export 4K from it. With the Epic-W, the footage was a lot easier to deal with, and this clip isn't actually color graded in post beyond applying an IPP2 preview LUT (the original one).

 
That makes sense, since it's taking the number of frames that you selected for processing and averaging them into one. I'm planning on experimenting with that as a way of doing longer than one second exposures for things like waterfalls and creeks.
 
One of the advantages of the Dragon sensor on frame averaging was you could average up to 16 frames. That was a long time when at say 1 frame per sec.

With Helium it doesn't seem to give you those numbers. Maybe due to pixel count.?
 
Russ Fill said:
One of the advantages of the Dragon sensor on frame averaging was you could average up to 16 frames. That was a long time when at say 1 frame per sec.

With Helium it doesn't seem to give you those numbers. Maybe due to pixel count.?
Click to expand...


It must be a temporary thing due to the firmware being a preview rather than complete, because I used to have up to 16 frames as options. I'd been looking forward to using frame summing for longer exposures, and experimenting with frame averaging to get the long exposure look on waterfalls and cascades and such.

Hopefully it's coming back...
 
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