Working with Time Lapse Stills

[Steve Lewis]

So,
I have been doing some time lapse photography and dragging the stills from the dslr camera into FCP as a numbered sequence, with each still lasting 1 frame. One weird thing is that when I drag the stills (about 460) into my ProRes422 timeline, the first 150 are render-status green and the rest are red (in need of render). My question is why would some be "previewable" and some not?

[Mike Hanlon]

I have a similar problem when I import a bunch of stills as animation (like from the original jump backs) in a DV timeline. I think it has to do with a cache the FCP keeps for stills. I tried adjusting the cache, but I just made it worse.

My solution is to export the timeline as a movie and import it back.

[Tim Dashwood]

The best way to handle timelapse stills is to use Quicktime Player Pro and "Open Image Sequence."
Then just save it as a quicktime (the original format and frame size will be maintained) and just drag into FCP.

[Steve Lewis]

I'll use QT Pro in the future....

In the mean time, I tried one today (there were no clouds so it isnt very interesting) and the sky came out all patchy and blotchy: www.vimeo.com/1494210

Why does it look like that? It looks good in FCP...

-Steve

[Liam Hall]

Originally Posted by Steve Lewis

I'll use QT Pro in the future....

In the mean time, I tried one today (there were no clouds so it isnt very interesting) and the sky came out all patchy and blotchy: www.vimeo.com/1494210

Why does it look like that? It looks good in FCP...

-Steve

Those blotches are compression artifacts.

[Steve Lewis]

Thanks Liam,
Is there a way I can get around that? Increase the bitrate maybe?
-Steve

[Matias Baridon]

Originally Posted by Steve Lewis

I'll use QT Pro in the future....

In the mean time, I tried one today (there were no clouds so it isnt very interesting) and the sky came out all patchy and blotchy: www.vimeo.com/1494210

Why does it look like that? It looks good in FCP...

-Steve

How did you shoot that Time Lapse? Did you use still pictures? Did you make each picture 1 frame long??

[Liam Hall]

Originally Posted by Steve Lewis

Thanks Liam,
Is there a way I can get around that? Increase the bitrate maybe?
-Steve

Yes, you could try a higher bit rate. You can upload quite large file sizes to Vimeo, so don't hold back. You could also try a different codec though,
all codecs that use GOPs suffer to some degree from this time of problem, just look at a fade to black on a DVD.

Have a look at my minireel on Vimeo, I used the H264 codec at about 70% quality;

http://www.vimeo.com/1297303

There are quite a few timelapse shots on it and you'll see you can get rid of that banding.