You're looking at Photoshop or Aperture to do batch Raw to JPEG conversion, so I'd be doing a conversion for two or three lighting situations, then doing a cross dissolve between the 'Expose for sunlight', 'Expose for cloud cover' and 'Expose for twighlight or night' during the edit so you can get good exposure without 'pumping' that occurs in short term fluctuations of light level and white balance.

I'll start with a couple of the intro shots to 'Winners Circle' - third one down on http://www.mdma.tv/cb but I have PMed you with something which will soon be up. When I get a chance (have been planning this since last August) I'll be putting together my showreel which will have oodles of under and over crank stuff.

Sorry, but so often in event video, almost all of the content is private and until I do a showreel, can't get the time to separate showable shots (mostly the timelapse stuff) from unshowable content.

PS: Sorry - forgot to hit 'submit reply'...

[QUOTE=Matt Daviss;998417]At some point, one has to consider doing timelapse the old fashioned way - with a DSLR. Plenty of little magic boxes to run them off car batteries, take images when something happens, be out in the open for weeks or months in locked down enclosures and so on.

A couple of things to note: DSLRs can work in raw mode, which means exposure variation and white balance can be sorted out in post, and that most shoot at a high enough resolution that - with a good wide - you can do some pan & scan work even at 1080p with resolution to spare.

How do you do the pan and scan work? Is this in After Effects? I'm OK as far far as preparing all the images from a DLSR but couldn't find the function for panning across the frame.

Thanks

Andy

Dave: How did you do the actual timelapse? Digisnap?

I actually have a 4500 and a DigiSnap (alas, the digisnap seems to have died). It is a great way to go. What I don't like about is the programming: it is easy enough to do and certainly is very flexible in what it can do but the need for a computer with a serial port is a bummer. I never got it to work with the usb/serial dohickey.

I've actually regressed a bit. I'm now using a Canon A10 with a laptop running Canon's remote capture. Much less flexible than Digisnap but is very easy to set up. Here is one I did with this setup: Tide goes out

The downside to both of these is the wires. You need to supply power to the camera and laptop or make sure the digisnap has adequate power. Then tether the camera to the TL device.

That's why I'm interested in the EX/HPX solution. Hooking up an external battery is not a big deal for me--that can just sit under the tripod. But the idea of having the TL being done by the camera is a winner for me.

And Dave, I guess I'm not sure that that method of raw processing would be worth the hassle. I've done both auto and manual exposure controls and both seem to result in flash frames due to lighting changes. If you could do keyframing on individual raws, that would be something.

And I'm still trying to come up with a joke regarding 'mdma'. I hope your clients are in ecstacy?

I'm sure After Effect with do it but I can do it with the layout tool in Edius 5. It will let you use the large picture and scale/crop/pan to create your desired final frame size.

I believe you can do the same thing in Vegas as well.

Yes, an older Digisnap 2000, IIRC.

The 2000 is SO basic and I use the little buttons on the face of the unit. I used to keep a "cheat sheet" with me on shoots when I decided to vary the timing parameters. ;)

I took one of my Quantum power packs that used to power my electronic flash units and made an adapter that would plug into the Coolpix 990 to power it for long shoots. It would sit on the ground under the tripod, usually. Also, I turned off anything that would deplete the battery faster.

I'd always figure out what the best exposure would be that could carry me through the exposure cycle and stay away from anything AUTO. Too much chance of the image brightness "pumping" if you used AUTO anything.