Timelapse

Homage from Adam Elliott on Vimeo.

One year i made quite a few timelapse sequences and had grand ambitions to make a feature length movie about Alaska. I even went on several strenuous hikes specifically to get timelapse footage of certain areas. But then it came time to figure out how to process and edit all that footage, and it was during that process that i quickly started to lose interest.

I'd been thinking of one for several years, and when Fisher lost his leg i used it as an excuse to buy a Sony HDR SR11. It took great looking movies in 1080p and had a very impressive macro zoom, but it also had a diamond shaped aperture that i hated. I also disliked the ACVHD format that it recorded in. At the time there was very little support for the format unless you used Sony's proprietary Vegas Pro software, which was expensive, not user friendly, and crashed more often than not on my computer.

The other major complaint i had about the camera was the false claim that it could record HD video in slow motion. The camera could make impressive slow motion video by creating a buffer on the hard drive. The problem was that when you watch it it's obviously not HD. What it looked like was that the camera was taking standard definition movies and then up-sampling them to 1080p.

I took that camera to locations in Alaska, Utah, Hawaii and Mexico. All the movies were nice looking, and i would have really liked it back when i went to New Zealand and Panama. But then i got the Canon Eos5dM2, and since that also records HD vdieo (in .mov format) the Sony became redundant. After not using it for 6 months i decided i better sell it before it dropped in value too much.

I had all this footage sitting around for a year, and i decided finally i better do something with some or the better stuff or i'd never do anything with it. The result is the over compressed video i've put up here (i couldn't figure out how to get imovie not to over compress). These clips are made from the Sony, my older 5d, and the newer 5dm2. I found out that i could get much sharper, crisper movies by taking a series of still photos instead of video. The only problem with that is that it seriously adds some mileage to the camera shutter. Every movie takes at least 10 to 15 minutes to record and in that time you might take four to six thousand pictures! If you want to go nuts and make an HDR timelapse you can multiply that by 3.