Timelapse on Epic?

[andyshon]

I've had an Epic X for about two years now but I've never seriously used it for timelapse. I've always used DSLRs for this task and have a bunch of tools to help in capture and processing. Recently I've been trying to film pretty adverse weather conditions, where the DSLRs can't shoot fast enough, so I'm trying to nail down a process with the Red. If anyone has any experience I'd be grateful for the advice.

The above shot is a right-off due to the vibrating lens flare (among other things), but it's a pretty good example of what I'm struggling with. The exposure needs ramping as a weather front moves in. How do folk do this? Step the exposure time as you would on a DSLR? In which case any advice on software/workflow for smoothing this in post? Or try to use a lens motor to smoothly (very slowly) turn the aperture ring? In which case what motors/controllers? The above shot had the aperture ramped manually, resulting in jerky exposure changes which have been smoothed in AE using one of RE:Vision's excellent deflicker plugins. Though it's worked ok it's a far from elegant solution and I didn't ramp it enough as I was worried that going too wide might start to have noticeable effects on the image.

I've got a bunch of sensor calibrations, done at different exposures and temperatures, which I always copy onto my mags. But in 50+ mph winds (often with sand/salt and whatever else flying around) the sensor temperature often stays down in the low teens and the fan makes some alarming noises. The temperature issue seems worse with timelapse, I guess because the sensor is less active. I'm considering taping up the vents, at least the front one. Any thoughts?

Any ingenious tricks to help with stability in high wind would also be much appreciated!?

 

[Chad Lancaster]

Hit me up if you have time-lapse questions, I've done a lot on my Dragon.

Not sure what your saying about the wind, are the fans in adaptive mode? As for stability its good to mount the monitor on the side of the camera to reduce it acting like a sail.

 

[Phil Holland]

When I shoot timelapse for feature productions in bad weather I setup wind screens, over head shades, and bag the hell out of everything. On Charlie St. Cloud I made hinged plexiglas panels that could travel with me in the truck to setup and tie down quickly, same for Pi and a few commercial projects as well. The nice thing there is I could monitor the camera through the panels to ensure nothing busted over the course of the take.

The weirdest thing I think I've done is rigged up a large cardboard box around the camera supported by C-Stands. That's mostly due to a random change in weather, but it makes a big difference when it comes to shot stability.

Moisture, rain, and mist droplets tend to be the biggest amount of hell to deal with. Depending on interval you may be able to clean occasionally between frames. I don't use spinners, but I have made "hot swap" clears to cycle through in the past while I clean them.

 

[andyshon]

Thanks for the replies chaps.

Chad - The fan is set to adaptive but I so often find myself shooting straight into the wind, which howls through the camera spinning the fan at speeds I'm sure it isn't designed for. I'm a little worried for its health. When I say 'temperature in the low teens' I mean celsius, in the 50s fahrenheit (in the UK we tend to use fahrenheit when its hot, celsius when its cold, just to be as confusing as possible). This is pretty far outside the MX sensors favoured range. Should I be worried about this?

Phil - Did you actually shoot through the plexiglas? I almost invariably find myself shooting into the wind. I like the cardboard box idea, more my budget. Ha ha. I thought of using a wildlife hide but then would it stand up in such strong winds? With a storm approaching the wind often gusts into the 70s mph. And then, shooting into the wind, how much protection would it actually provide?

I've never tried a spinner. It's another awkward, heavy piece of kit to add to the list. I'm often on my own trying to react to rapidly changing weather conditions. For dew I have a fan mined from an old PC that I mount blowing across the lens. This prevents condensation forming and discourages flies from landing on the lens. But this is for use in still conditions. Has anyone tried these Tokina hydrophilic filters (http://www.tokinacinema.com/filters/hydrophilic_coating_filter.html)? Not cheap either but much more user friendly than a spinner.

I think I've answered my exposure ramping question, by 'reading the f***ing manual'. Using the 'Advanced' exposure menu, integration time can be adjusted in very small increments. Or I could build a 'custom' shutter speed list for ramping timelapses. I then make the adjustments manually to match scene changes. It's still not super elegant and won't be totally smooth, but I'll bet it'll be smoother than using the aperture ring and will have a larger range, though the range will still be limited by the maximum exposure time any particular sensor calibration can handle without hot pixels showing. Any jerkiness left will be minor and easily smoothed with RE:Vision as above. I've not tried this yet but I think it may be the best solution. Anyone tried a similar approach? Better ideas very welcome!

 

[Daniel Kelly Brown]

I would start your shot over exposed a few stops for sunset and let it go until it gets completely black and vice versa for sunrise. Shoot it at lowest compression ratio and ramp the levels a bit in post. Trying to change the exposure on Red cameras would just look unprofessional IMO, plus its a lot of work to sit there with the dam thing and do that.

You can avoid that red orb by getting some ND's and shooting at lower apertures. Or STH olpf on dragon will eliminate them. Edit= (On second take that looks like a red flair from the lens rather then one caused by high aperture)

Get one of these tripods and you will eliminate the shake in wind- http://www.reallyrightstuff.com/TVC-33-Tripod-BH-55-LR-Ballhead
Also helps to scale down epic and power it with the battery belt off the tripod.

Also I have found for sunsets and sunrise when shooting at 1fps or higher, you really only need to shoot during the magic hour light to get the goods.

Similar but unrelated TL red info:
I just started to mess around with frame summing again on the weapon with its auto calibration. Still tricky to get a clean image, but I am getting closer! For some strange reason ISO needs to be all the way down for clean image in frame summing mode...which kinda defeats the point of trying to do starry night shots on Red Cameras.

 

[Daniel Kelly Brown]

Also for all those wanting to shoot day to night time lapses smoothly without too much hassle, you can do this now on SONY A7 cameras!

Download the time lapse app, fire it up, set camera to A mode locking down the aperture and letting shutter fluctuate (and put on auto iso if going to stars but limit it to 8000iso or lower). Then in time lapse app settings set AEL (lock) to LOW. Bam super simple and buttery smooth day to night transitions. So very stoked on this little bit of awesome and thought I would share.

This invention looks pretty promising if you dont have a A7 camera- https://www.kickstarter.com/project...meter-auto-ramping-and-wifi-camera-r?ref=card
I picked one up simply for the live preview feature.

 

[Enrique Blein]

https://www.kickstarter.com/project...meter-auto-ramping-and-wifi-camera-r?ref=card

me too! I was backer #18, looks VERY promising indeed

 

[andyshon]

I managed to get out the other night and test a few of these ramping ideas. There had been some interesting cloud building up all day so I thought there might be a nice sunset. There was and there was one reasonably pronounced sun dog (parhelion, rainbow like effect that appears beside a low sun when it shines through descending cirrus cloud). It gave me a decent test subject at least.

I tried three approaches to ramping on the Epic. For one shot I ramped the shutter speed in tiny increments as described above. For another I used HDR-X and cross faded between the two tracks in post. The remaining shots on the Epic I captured with no ramping and added gain in post. I also shot a couple of wides on a Canon 5D2.

The second shot of of the parhelion (the one with the island and the edge of the boating lake in it) was ramped by nearly three stops using the fine exposure time adjustment on the Epic. You’re right Daniel, it was extremely tedious to do but the results are remarkably smooth. I’d say this is the best method, if you care enough about the shot. It is very boring to do but with practice it could be smooth straight out of camera and the range could be quite large. (This camera has so many hidden depths, maybe there’s an auto feature that could handle this? I haven't tried the auto exposure/focus modes.)

The close up of the sun setting was shot with HDR-X, 2 stops between tracks, just avoiding clipping the X track at the beginning. At the start you see only the X track, at the end only A, with a linear cross fade between. Works pretty well and lots lazier than above. I’ll probably try 3 stops between tracks next time but I’d guess that’s about the limit.

The two shots towards the end (the promenade and the twilight clouds) were shot flat (exposing to the point of clipping at the beginning) and ramped by about 2 stops in post. Again this has worked ok but on the MX sensor 2 stops is about as far as I’d like to push it, especially with more contrasty scenes.

Daniel - I have never tried the frame processing modes but all of the Red shots in this collection were captured 4-8 times faster than you see them here and I've used frame blending to speed them up in post. The resulting images are squeaky clean. If you had fast motion in shot it wouldn't work so well, but the motion blur in these is pretty natural looking. Doing this in camera (frame averaging) would save a lot of processing time and could be great if it produces images this clean. But I’m not convinced by the frame summing mode. As you say, it’s always going to be noisy, and when a camera a tenth the price does a better job...

The two wides in this collection were shot on a 5D2 using Magic Lantern ETTR for ramping. This is “experimental" software but it runs on top of the camera firmware (no external hardware) and judges exposure based on the raw image data as opposed to the jpeg preview (as far as I’m aware it’s the only system that does this). It makes maximum use of the DR of Canon SLRs, which is their Achilles heel, and that’s why I risk it. (http://www.magiclantern.fm/forum/index.php?topic=5705.0)

My colleague is a Nikon man and he uses QDSLR Dashboard. It supports Canon and Nikon (and I believe Sony) SLRs, runs on a tablet or smart phone, does the job about as well as I've seen and integrates well with LRTimelapse, which we use for all the processing. (http://dslrdashboard.info/introduction/)

The VIEW does look good. I think I might join you in backing it. I’ve also been thinking about the A7, mainly as a timelapse camera, but I’m worried about the lens mount adapters with heavy lenses. I might wait and see what the 5D mkIV looks like before I take the plunge.

 

[Todd T]

Here is a day to night timelapse I shot in Scarlet-X using frame summing and the Exposure Assist set to auto-aperture(slow) and auto-shutter speed.
I think it handled the change well even though the iris change flicker come through.