Been awhile since I posted anything in here. My new rig is up and running beautifully. I made a comment over in another thread about a feature in Mantis that wasn't working for me. It was of course my fault that it wasn't working. I am shooting a 1000 frame time-lapse right now of my ugly workshop with me going in and out of frame. Nothing mind blowing. It is working as described, the rig is moving while I am shooting 1 fps so there should be some nice motion blur.

Hey Gerald, I changed my Youtube channel, so if you want to see what I am up to with my Mantis you can have a look here,
http://youtu.be/blGiGJgjTMc

With this little hiccup out of the way I am planning some time-lapse stuff over the coming weeks, even though its a gettin cold here Canada!

Sorry, I should explain DSLR. It allows the Mantis controller to trigger most if not all DSLRs to fire off a frame while the rig is in constant motion. There is also an intervalometer setting as well so that you can shoot frames with spacings of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks etc.

UPDATE: The rig just stopped! so I'm gonna go and get the frames and see how they look. Amazing that I am still running a lowly T2i for my stuff! But hey, it works!

Got the 1000 frames, processed them in iPhoto then threw them on a timeline in FcPX. Buttery smooth. Looks as smooth as the realtime plates I shot. I'll throw them up on YouTube soon.

Doug, interested in your post- production flow using iphoto and fcp x.
(I have been using quicktime to make an image sequence out of frames and then export as '4K' self-contained quicktime movie onto the fcp x timeline.)

Hey Matt,
I import the images into iPhoto which is very quick then do a batch export of jpegs. I did this for the first time just yesterday so I could edit them more easily in FcPX. I am not running a very fast machine so I chose this method otherwise my little Mac-mini can take quite awhile ingesting even small 2K images coming straight out of the camera. This method reduces them down to a more manageable size. The good thing is that I still have the larger 2K files to play with if needed. The resultant quality is 1920/1080 and is fine for upload to YouTube or Vimeo. I'll get the test up on my YouTube channel soon.

Thanks, you may be interested in this clip describing a jpeg image sequence workflow.

I usually work on a MacPro with most of my Events already transcoded to ProRes HQ outside of the fcpx environment.
But this clip also shows how to save a Quicktime timelapse movie sequence as a reference file, saving time and disk space.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kgN5mJa ... A&index=28

(These guys like a chat but the info is OK)

Here is the last test using the DSLR settings in Mantis.
http://youtu.be/caDg_nkKOKA
Nice and smooth and nice blur.

Hey Doug,

Looking at your first video where you show your rig on the track. How have you mounted the tubing to the u shaped aluminium ? I'd like to use a similar method to strengthen the tube.

Cheers,

Steve R.

For my current setup I have the tubes anchored at three points with screws through the tubing through the U channel into the wood beneath. The tubing and the U channel are both 1 inch.

Hi Just to clarify. Kflop native can do 1.6 Ghz. In Mantis I have set a User limit of 500Mhz. In reality this is more than most stepper drives will allow anyway. At these rates the pulse length becomes very short and the drives won't respond.

Also to need these rates you'd have to be using crazy microstepping rates which offer little practical advantage in smoothness...

Cheers Gerald