Timelapse with the D90
Or I could have called this what can go wrong will go wrong.
I thought I would outline some of the details of how I made the Sketch of a cup video.
Gear:
- Nikon D90
- 18-55mm VR lens kit lens.
- Asus R2h Umpc
- Nikon Camera Control 2.3.0
- Spare Battery
The Nikon D90 does not have an interval timer function (D300/D700 do) so the only accurate way to do this is to run the camera from the computer. The software was setup to take a shot every 2 seconds.
Selected Exif Data:
Model – NIKON D90
Software – Camera Control Pro 2.3.0 W
ExposureTime – 1/20 seconds
FNumber – 4.50
ISOSpeedRatings – 400
ExposureBiasValue – 0.00
MaxApertureValue – F 4.00
MeteringMode – Multi-segment
LightSource – Auto
Flash – Flash not fired, auto mode
FocalLength – 24 mm
ColorSpace – sRGB
ExposureMode – Auto
White Balance – Auto
FocalLengthIn35mmFilm – 36 mm
Lens type – 234881024
Lens – 840
Noise Reduction – OFF
Now the what went wrong….
The first two drawings the camera was all set up and still managed to get to much of Cat in the drawing so you couldn’t see it. The Software crashed everytime I stopped the shooting process. I put this more down to the R2H being a bit long in the tooth these days.
Then there is the final drawing the one that features in the video…
Halfway through the shot the main light we had set up for the shot blew. (you can see this on the video) which meant I had to stop the camera. Which lead to another software crash and me touching the camera. (To swap battery) You will notice that after the light blub change the angle changes just slightly. And that angle change also introduced a bounce into the shots. The camera was at the very extent of the tripod meaning that I had now introduced a small bounce between frames.
Post processing was done as a batch conversion in Irfanview to down-sample the jpg’s (1194 of them) from 2144×1424 300dpi to 720×478 72dpi
Then I used AnimatorDV Simple+ to compile the Jpg’s into an AVI format. This was then set to encode at 10fps so that the video was long enough.
However you can see the end result is still pretty good. Next time we do this these lessons will be taken into account and I will write another post about what goes wrong with that shot.
And here is the video….
