UKC

I'm quite proud of this first attempt at a Day to Night time lapse.

The only problem is that, this time of year, it does not get dark.

Doh!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzrcw0mN3Rk&t=3s

That's very nice, thanks. I had to have it muted, will try to listen later

That's very good. I thought it was going to be a previously unknown Gerry and The Pacemakers track.

Excellent!! Did you plane to capture the moon? Or a fortuitous coincidence?

It was planned by a mate of mine. I just went along for the ride and got a great timelapse.

My mission is still to get a day to night subject, however I will have to wait till at least late August for anything to be dark enough.

Can you guess what time I took it?

https://www.flickr.com/photos/the1lemming/52957405464/in/dateposted/

Was the way the moon appears to come out of the top of the building at the same angle  as the roof planned or luck?

Luck, ish.

I was hoping for the moon to come out of the Liver Building but was off by a smidgen. Happy with how it turned out though.

Congratulations on a very fine, beautiful piece of work.

That is exceptionally kind of you to say.

Very nice, can I ask what software you used to compile the images. And does it take long to learn for someone with reasonable photography knowledge but zero time lapse or video experience.

That is rather awesome.

Your first decision is how long to take between images. If its a fast moving subject like people walking about or bouldering then I'd suggest one second intervals.

If its fluffy clouds then it depends how fast those clouds are moving. If they are scuttling at a fair pace then maybe two seconds and if they are going slow then maybe six seconds.

Your next decision is how long do you keep the shutter open for each image. If the shutter is open for 100th of a second or even smaller then you will capture stuttered images with jerky movement. You may have no choice if you are using a phone or compact camera.

However if you want some sort of motion blur to give a more fluid movement then I'd suggest halving your shutter open for half the time of your gap between images. If your gap between images is two seconds then have your shutter open for one second. In broad daylight this becomes a problem and you could solve it with Neutral density Filters that reduce the amount of light coming into the camera.

After all that you just use the photo editing software of your choice to titillate your images how you like them and then export to either DNG files or JPEG files. This really depends on what video editing software you are going to make your final product.

With video editing software your next decision is choosing frame rates to create your masterpiece. Twenty-five frames per second is normally for European countries. While thirty frames per second is for places like North America. But rule of thumb, the higher the frame rate, then the faster your final video will be because you will get through your photos more quickly when editing.

If you are publishing your masterpiece to YouTube then it does not really matter what frame rate you use because YouTube work's its magic and compresses the shit out of your video.

Frame Rate is only important if you are watching on a European or American TV/Monitor. The frame rates differ because of the electricity of those countries. European countries use 50Hz and USA uses 60Hz. Get it wrong and you can get flickering if filming indoors with electric lights.

This is a time lapse where the shutter was open for a fraction of a second. You can see the stuttering.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cT5MCxNh0Ek&list=PLzozqJXQFVeGZ2QtVO4LW...

And this time lapse had the shutter open for half the time between each image captured.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAfzxK1bMYY&list=PLzozqJXQFVeGZ2QtVO4LW...

No stuttering and more motion blur.

Here is a Tutorial that may give more advice.

youtube.com/watch?v=zreDIDDxFU0&

Thank you.

Its probably my best ever time lapse.

Very nice. Is the tracking a consequence of the filming or editing?

Thanks for the advice, I've got the Sony A7 mk 3, a 10 stop Nd filter and can sometimes get some images that I'm pretty pleased with. So I'm not a novice at stills, but never tried video or time lapse.

I've got the lightroom classic subscription, I see there are ways of doing time lapse using lightroom and some additional free software. But if you want to stay with Adobe, I would need premier pro I think?

What software did you use?

Nicely done. Great to capture the moon in such a large and colourful state.

Funnily enough I've been getting into time-lapses recently. Got myself a slider and everything.... It make for some interesting projects. I've not had the chance to be in a nice place at a nice time of day yet (either just in the garden for sunset, or the middle of the day for the countryside....family life with young kids), but one or the other is still fun. 

Keep it up Lemming.

The tracking was done post production. I'd like a sliding table but they are just so expensive to justify using them for an occasional project.

Also my camera takes RAW images of 5792x4352 pixels and when I edit my projects I use the screen 4k HD screen resolution of 3840x2160 pixels. This gives my plenty of scope to move around the image with no loss of image quality cropping in.

I also have a 10 stop ND filter and I've used it probably twice since I bought it. I mostly use 3 Stop and 6 Stop filters for filming and taking Time Lapse images during bright daylight.

However I've just bought a Peter Macinnon variable ND filter from 5 Stops to 2 Stops and I really am impressed with how versitile the filter is. Rather than having to swap out my two standerd filters, this one filter is great for slowly adjusting exposure. There is no colour cast that I can spot and as long as my focal range stays well above 12mm (Micro Four Thirds) I don't get any X-Man banding.

I have a very old copy of Lightroom 5.7 and until this year I used it for everything. Its still excellent however to use images from my Panasonic cameras, I had to convert the RAW files, which are not supported by Lightroom 5.7, into DNG files. I then used Topaz Sharpen and DeNoise to sexy up the images edited by the old copy of Lightroom.

And then I discovered DxO Photolabs and I stopped using Lightroom completely. Occasionally I will export an image from Photolabs to Topaz Sharpening just to add a little extra polish. I don't touch Topaz DeNoise any more as it tends to make my images look a little plasticy and I can't quite put my finger on why.

DxO Photolabs is light-years better than my old copy of Lightroom 5.7 that it was a no brainer to stop using it.

This image was edited in DxO Plotolabs and then sent to Topaz Sharpen for a little jazzing up.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/the1lemming/52957405464/in/dateposted/

As for video editing, I use Davinci Resolve by Blackmagic. This software is free and in my opinion the best video editing software available, period.

I liked it so much that I bought the full version and never regretted that purchase for a single second. The free version is perfectly useable and you'd probably never need to upgrade the free version.

I'd love one of those, just to experiment with parallax.

Got any time lapses to show off here?

Ta. I’ve done a few but nothing as good. And not involving tracking.

You could buy an egg timer and place your camera on top of that.

Supposed to get great results.

You mean the wee things that rotate? That’s a brilliant idea 🤩 

About 10pm?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rWLsOV6qhi0&feature=youtu.be
 

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=A0DLDfBnfJk&feature=youtu.be

As I say, I’m just figuring out how to do it and haven’t managed to actually take any in really nice light conditions yet. 
On a technical note: Sony A6400, 10-18 F4. Neewer motorised slider. Images edited in LR, imported to Premiere Pro, warp stabiliser plugin applied to help with smoothness. 

In my experience, full-on day-to-night timelapse is MUCH harder than just constant light timelapse. You have massive change in light levels, but you can't usually use auto-exposure (most cameras won't reliably auto-expose in true dark). It's tricky!

Here's an early (jerky) attempt:  youtube.com/watch?v=n-QnmYacgfo&

They were really good and has increased my desire to get a Slider.

I shall have to wait a couple of months before it goes dark again. May I ask what you learned from this attempt, which I must say, Id' be proud of capturing?

I've not done a day-to-night time lapse, but I believe LRTimeLapse will sort out the differences in exposure between the frames. I bought a licence and have used it for normal daytime TLs. My (second) attempt:

https://flic.kr/p/2oApDi2

Should also say your YT video is ace 😎 Brilliantly done.

There are really two issues: (1) capture and (2) post-processing...

1. Day-to-night means you typically are getting ~17-18 stops difference in light levels. Most cameras (in my experience) don't do auto-exposure very well at night. You also have the complication that quite often at night you have intermittent bright light sources (e.g., car head-lights, moon coming out form behind clouds...) which further messes up any attempt at consistent auto-exposure. YMMV.

2. With day-to-night you have the challenge of adjusting exposures in post-processing to get a smooth gradation between successive images even when the actual exposures have 1/3 or 1 Ev steps between them. Software like LRTimeTapse will do that for you (at a price) and with varying degrees of success.

Me being me, I decide to write my own code to solve both problems: I have code which controls the camera setting shutter speed and ISO of the next capture based on the partial raw histogram of the previous image (a.k.a "ramping") with optional masking (usually mask out below the horizon). I capture small raw images. I prefer raw since I'm going to be matching/adjusting exposures in post and that a lot easier and more accurate with linear data. My post-processing code allows you to define "keyframes" (for exposure, colour balance, contrast, saturation...) and then interpolates the images between the keyframes. The code uses rawtherapee-cli to do the heavy-lifting in terms of image adjustment, my code just creates the PP3 sidecar files. I can blend adjacent images when the shutter time is too short (e.g., daytime - you can't really use an ND filter in day-to-night). Finally the code uses ffmpeg to create the video from the set of still images. I'm just revisiting the post-processing code after writing most of it last year - I wasn't happy with the jerky video output (traced to incorrect ffmpeg options) and the pan-in-software-during-resampling from full-res stills to lower-res video.

Any other solution is likely to have to do much the same things, albeit perhaps in different ways. Yes, it's messy - that's why some people call it "holy grail timelapse" - but an interesting challenge.

That’s a stunning clip! Really mesmerising. 

Just got in from work and realised this is a video and not a single image.

That is truly mesmerising and a great subject.

Thanks for comment on what you learned through your exercise. I'll be honest 99.9% of that went way over my head.

I'm a simple monkey see, monkey do sort of person. However I do like to try to improve on my projects.

Cheers

Like with so much in life, the problem may be simple but the solution isn't.