Mine | Chris Beaumont

f22 Project – Week 5 – Timelapse!

Forest Hill Timelapse (Canon 5D Mkii) from Chris Beaumont on Vimeo.

This week I thought I’d try a bit of timelapse, which I guess isn’t, strictly speaking, photography, but hey, I used a stills camera, I processed the images in Lightroom, and I shot (nearly) everything at f22, so it’s almost there, isn’t it? I suppose I’m stretching the remit of the project a little this week, but I’ve only got so much time on my hands, and the idea to do this came directly from the image I shot last week, so I’m not too worried.

Timelapse is fun and frustrating in equal measure. Actually, no, it’s a lot more fun than frustrating, but that’s not to say that it isn’t very annoying when 3 hours of work ends up un-usable because of some silly mistake or oversight.

The technique is deceptively simple in concept – all you need is a camera, a good sturdy tripod, an intervalometer (a programable device to trigger the exposures on a set routine – I use the Canon TC 80n3), and lots of time. You point the camera at your scene, set your intervalometer to record an image every couple of seconds, sit back for 15 minutes or so and then gather the images together in a video editor.

In practice, however, things are inevitably not so simple, and things go wrong all the time. I don’t think I had a clean run where at least something wasn’t problematic.

Here’s what I learned about timelapse this weekend …

Don’t. Touch. The Tripod. I know this is glaringly obvious but every shot that I attempted this weekend was jittery because I kept milling about near to my tripod, moving the floorboards it was sitting on, and knocking it accidentally from time to time. The smallest disturbances register on the final render as minor but jarring blips in what should be a smooth playback.
Shooting RAW rather than JPEG – gives you a lot more flexibility in post, but (especially with the 21 mega pixel 5D mkii) means you need high capacity cards (32GB), and increases the amount of time you spend in post significantly, as you need to convert all the RAW files to JPEGs, which takes a good amount of time. Converting 32GB of RAW images into JPEGs once you’ve made some adjustments in something like Adobe Lightroom is going to take a couple of hours.
You can get an unpleasant flickering that can be fixed by using a plugin called Long Exposure from CHV-Plugins. It’s very good, but some experimentation is required with the settings to get the right look. The default settings tend to merge one frame into the next a little too much, so that all the detail from your rolling clouds is lost as everything is smoothed out too much. Pulling back a little on the Timespan slider, and changing the mix to about 75% seems to get rid of the flicker without losing too much detail.
Weather is really important. It’s been proper glum in London for the last few weeks, and grim overcast skies don’t make for a very interesting timelapse. I was waiting in vain all weekend for some fluffy clouds but they never really emerged.
High failure rate. I shot about 10 timelapses over the weekend, but I think there’s only 2 decent shots in the edited video above (shot 3 and the shot of the cross-roads with the cars). The other shots are just there as filler really, and everything else ended up useless because of some problem or other.

I’ve had way more failures than successes with timelapse so far, but it’s really fun, and very satisfying when it works. I’ll definitely be back for more. Perhaps when the weather’s improved a bit though!

Also, it would be remiss of me not to say that loads of incredible advice and guidance about how to do practically anything video related with a Canon 5D MKii is available on Philip Bloom’s website, and I got much of the info about how to shoot and treat timelapse from his site. Have a look at his most recent timlapse video ‘Sky’, along with detailed production notes, here.

Becoming Cyborgs

Becoming Cyborgs – an interview with Professor Kevin Warwick (Canon 5D MkII) from Chris Beaumont on Vimeo.

This was my first time out with the Canon 5D MkII – I think I’d only had it for a day or so when I took it out on this shoot, and I made a number of rookie mistakes! First and foremost, I hadn’t figured out how to get the camera out of ‘auto’ for shooting video, and subsequently the exposures aren’t what I would have liked them to be. For some reason the colours came out very yellow as well, so I had to struggle to correct it properly in post, but didn’t have a lot of luck – I don’t really like the final grade; his eyes look very pink around the edges, and his face is a funny kind of peachy colour.

I also ran out of space on my compact flash cards half way through the interview, having completely underestimated how much space one needs when shooting video. Luckily I bought along a Sony Z1 which was running alongside the 5D!

If anyone has any suggestions (with links perhaps) for how to make one on one interviews more interesting to look at as pieces of entertainment I’d be really keen to hear them.

Kit used …

Sony Z1
Canon 5D MkII
Dedo portable light kit

Corporate Christmas Card

Corporate Christmas Card – Canon 7D from Chris Beaumont on Vimeo.

A corporate “Christmas Card” video that I shot using the Canon 7D last month.

I realise that everyone’s probably had enough of Christmas by now, but in the end this video, for reasons not fully understandable, was left on the (digital) cutting room floor, as the company I made it for didn’t want to use it, and I thought it a shame to have spent so much time making it for nobody to see it!

Everything apart from the overhead tree decorating sequence, which was shot as a stills time lapse on a Canon 5D, was shot at 720@60fps on a Canon 7D and slowed down to 25fps in Cinema Tools to get nice slow motion.

The 7D is great, and makes lovely images, but it’s not a patch on the 5D when it comes to low light performance.

Everything edited and graded in FCP.

Behind the scenes of an Aston Martin DBS "Car Tech" shoot

Aston Martin DBS Here’s a few left over, “behind the scenes” shots from a recent Car Tech shoot I was involved with for CNET.co.uk, along with a video I cut together using some of the footage I shot on my recently purchased Canon 5D MkII.

This was pretty much my first outing using the 5D MkII as a video camera, and there’s a few rookie mistakes in there (I had it on full auto by accident!). It’s trite to say it these days as everyone’s clued in to the secret by now, but the footage that comes off the 5D is incredible. What little grading there is on this was done in After Effects, but there are only very minor contrast bumps. What you see is pretty much what came off the CF card.

I shot the video using two lenses – a Sigma f1.4 DG HSM 50mm, and a Canon f4 24-105mm. I also used a Glidetrack HD for the tracking shots. The presenter is Rory Reid of CNET.co.uk, and the bearded chap is Drew Stearne, Car Tech’s lead video producer.

Aston Martin DBS from Chris Beaumont on Vimeo.

Gamefaces – a proof of concept

Before saying anything, a disclaimer – this idea is inspired by/a rip off of photographer Robbie Cooper’s Immersion that did the rounds on the blogosphere a few weeks ago. Robbie’s work is far more involved, well researched, and polished than what you see here; me and a few guys at work having some fun and trying to figure out how to pull the trick of playing games into a tele-prompter off. Robbie’s video is part of a larger study into human interactions. We’re just trying to figure out a way to get some cool footage for use on the video games website we make video for. Go check out Robbie’s blog - he’s very active on the comments on his posts and it’s been a pleasure reading his interactions with people.

Anyway, as you can probably tell, this was a lot of fun to make. It’s taken us a couple of week’s head scratching to figure out an easy way to use a tele-prompter to capture this kind of footage. The main sticking point was how to reverse the output of the monitor so that the game being played would be the right way round once it’d bounced off the mirrored surface of the tele-prompter. Over the weekend, work mate Drew Stearne had a eureka moment and figured it all out, and today we put it all together and did some filming.

We were all really happy with the results – it’s a little rough round the edges (the audio is all on-camera mic, the picture is a bit wonky and the lighting isn’t quite right), but nothing that can’t be cleaned up.

Having captured the footage and started going through it, what was apparent straight away was how completely natural the expressions and mannerisms of the people being filmed are. The distraction of playing the game seems to completely override any awareness of the recording camera. Intimate footage that is usually so hard to get is present in virtually every frame. The other obvious thing that makes this so much fun is the little facial twitches that people exhibit, seemingly unique to each person. I seem to have a habit of rapidly pursing my lips, while Ash is prone to minute puffs of the cheek. Guy is a games journalist, which might go some way to explaining his mono-expressioned poker face, cracking a satisfied grin only when victory was assured.

Now we need to figure out a way to use this technique in our fortnightly video games show – any ideas are welcome!

Testing the video on the Nikon D90

Transitions from Chris Beaumont on Vimeo.

I’ve been walking around with a Nikon D90 in my bag for the last few weeks instead of my usual Canon DSLR. Like most people with more than a passing interest in photography and video I was pretty excited to see that the D90 and the Canon 5D MkII both have HD video recording capabilities, so having the opportunity to have a thorough play with the D90 has been quite exciting.

The intial response to the video from the team of video producers I work with was one of bemused indifference. From a video producers point of view, there are a number of deal breaking problems …

The output is compressed using the Apple OpenDML JPEG codec into AVI containers that aren’t native to Final Cut Pro, which means you have to transcode all the clips before you can use them properly in Final Cut. You can edit them in Premier Pro without transcoding, but it does it with the red bars above the timeline, and After Effects kept crashing when using them.
That would be fine as long as the quality was up to scratch; if you’re getting something great looking then it’s worth going through the hassle of a transcode workflow, but the quality just isn’t that great, especially with the stock lens that comes with the D90. The compression frequently does strange things to people’s faces, and there’s generally a lack of sharpness and definition. The quality is certainly below HDV, for my money, which is a problem.
The “Rolling Shutter” defect is apparent in full effect. An explanation of rolling shutter can be found here, but it basically means that if you’re not shooting on a tripod and using fairly slow pans and tilts, what you’re shooting will warp and bend in a very noticeable and undesirable way.
You can auto-focus before you start recording, but once it’s going, you’re on your own, which is pretty hard core, and it’s difficult to manual focus using the screen on the back of the camera. It allows you to do some very cool things with focus, but it’d be so much better if you could auto-focus too.
The audio is dreadful. On camera mic only, recorded at 11.025khz, mono. Enough said.

Having said all that, there are a few things about it that I love …

The quality isn’t that bad. It’s not going to convince any pro video guys to ditch their video cameras and start using DSLR bodies, but as a first crack of the whip from Nikon, in their consumer DSLR, it’s a good place to start from. The picture has enough latitude that you can happily push and pull the picture about in After Effects at least as much as you can with HDV footage.
You can use Nikon’s entire range of DSLR lenses with it. This means you can get some seriously good looking pictures, in low light conditions with 1.4f lenses, with lots of shallow depth of field, and cool rack focus effects. I haven’t had a go with any of Nikon’s high end lenses myself, but have a look at some of the stuff on vimeo to see what I mean:

The happy Reaper from justin jerome chance on Vimeo.

Färsbiffarna from lickitup on Vimeo.
The convenience of having just one camera to shoot good looking stills and video is pretty unbeatable. Instead of just thinking about stills when I’m out now, I’m starting to think about getting stock video footage aswell, which means that before long I’ll have a massive library of good looking stock footage, without the hassle of having to take a bulkier HDV camera around with me. The other thing about using a stills camera to capture footage is that it makes it easier to get stock footage of random people without them noticing you. You can hold the camera down in front of your chest in a way that makes it look like you’re just checking out some images on the screen, when in fact you’re reeling off video. You can’t really do anything inconspicuous with a Sony Z1 or similar sized camera, but I found myself able to get very natural, intimate shots of people with the D90, simply because the people weren’t aware that they were being filmed.
Even though there’s a workflow transcode, it’s still really convenient to have the whole process be digital.

To conclude, it’s not there yet, for me anyway. It was great fun recording and editing with the footage, but it’s not a viable proposition for someone who’s primarily interested in video. I doubt that Nikon were aiming at video people with this camera, of course, and it helps if you try to view it as a bonus feature on a good stills camera rather than an out-and-out video camera, which it obviously isn’t.