Lots to talk about, so lets dive in. You can click on any photo/screenshot to see a larger version.
Camera Setup
if your camera has a shade, use it to keep lens flare spots off of your lens.
Check to see if your camera has manual exposure or exposure lock. If it does, the easiest setup is to first auto-expose, then either set exposure lock or switch to manual exposure. The reason to use exposure lock is if clouds pass in front of the sun, a camera on automatic exposure will brighten the picture to compensate. In a time lapse sequence this will cause lots of flicker to occur as the screen brightness changes.
Exposure tip - On a bright, sunny day, you can use your video camera’s spot meter to manually expose on the blue sky. If your camera has center weighted metering, it will also work if you can find an area with enough blue sky to completely fill the center of the frame. After setting your exposure on the sky, lock the exposure and then compose your shot. If it is extremely overcast and you don’t have blue sky, meter on trees or grass and then underexpose by -2/3 of a stop. If you don’t have spot or center metering, use the directions in the preceding paragraph.
If possible, set your White Balance to “sunny” or cloudy” depending on the lighting. Using these settings is almost always better than automatic white balance.
Try to find a static subject somewhere in your foreground if you are photographing clouds, such as a building or mountains, both to add interest to the shot and give the viewer a sense of scale.
Use a tripod. Shooting for about an hour should give you a nice sequence
Editing your video
I’m showing examples using Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 8, the “Home Studio” version of Sony Vegas Pro. The software is extremely powerful, and I highly recommend it to get your feet wet with video editing. The platinum version includes the ability to work with HDV or AVCHD High Definition video. You also get DVD Architect for burning DVDs from your productions. I think it is a great value for $129.95
Editing your video for time lapse is easy, but can be time consuming. Import your video into Vegas. All you need to do is go to the end of the video sequence, and using your mouse, ctrl-click on the end of the sequence and drag it to the left as far as you can:
Vegas will want to try and resample your video sequence to compensate for the now shorter length, by blending frames together. For time lapse sequences, you don’t want to resample, so right-click anywhere on the video track, choose Properties, and turn off resampling:
When you playback your video you will most likely think it is not fast enough. At this point you need to render your video to a new track:
Once you’ve rendered to a new track you can remove the orginal tracks from your video and work with your new track only. Simply repeat the same steps as above: turn off resampling, and ctrl-click drag left and resize your video again. For the time lapse I posted yesterday, I needed to make new tracks twice to finally get the speed I wanted.
Once you have your track at the speed you want, simply render your video out to the format you want, the same as you would with any other video.
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