I'm very new to time lapse, but I have been a still photographer for quite a while and thinking of video output is new and challenging. I will be assisting another photographer with a large elaborate studio shoot with 40-50 subjects being photographed over a 4 hour time period. We have the lighting worked out, studio time has been booked and all of the shoot details are in order.

I was thinking it would be fun to do a time lapse of this shoot. So far I'm thinking of using two cameras, one a wide angle to get the entire studio so that all of the various activities will be recorded and a second camera that is more of a telephoto that will be pointed at the spot that we will be photographing the various subjects. Thinking that I will use manual exposure, the studio lights are constant so there should be no variation in the exposures. I am thinking that I will be I will take one frame every 2 seconds and I will use jpeg so that I can film the entire two hours and not need to change out cards. As I am assisting I think I will not be able to check the cameras very often.

I am thinking that I will use tripods that are fairly tall and the cameras will be pointing slightly downward as hat may be a more interesting composition and more likely to capture interesting activities during the shoot.

This footage will be put together so he can use it to promote his business. We may also try to capture some of the post processing work as well, but we have not planned any of that as of yet.

Have I forgotten anything that I should be thinking about? Does this sound like it would work out? Any kind of suggestions or critiques would be greatly appreciated.

The first video I captured with my DSLR I had the camera as a vertical . . . sideways waterfalls look kind of funny.

Thanks for your help,

Scott

Try to get a longish exposure time using manual exposure mode , say 1/2 second, using iso and aperture adjustments. Use a ND filter to get the longer exposure if necessary. Depending on your camera use the twisted lens trick to avoid flicker caused by the very small mechanical variations that occur if the lens is shutting down the aperture for each exposure. Set the lens to manual focus.

Make sure the camera in not in auto white balance and use a white card to preset the correct WB to avoid having to adjust all of the images in post processing, shooting in jpeg this is important as you cannot correct the WB during a raw > jpg or tiff conversion. It maybe possible to shoot in a lower resolution RAW mode which will give you more control later in the processing. At long as the image file is greater than 1920x1080 then you can produce a HD video

I'm sure there is plenty of other things that the serious TL guys can added but the above is the basic requirements

regards
Kev

Kev -

Thanks, I definitely had not thought about using a longer shutter speed. I am generating a shot list for this type of activity and I really aprreciate you spendingthe time to respond.

Scott