Case Study - Roadside Time Lapse

For more information on shooting/selling stock footage check out my other posts:
GETTING STARTED
KEYWORDING
WHAT SELLS?

I've been eyeing this spot for a night time lapse. It's just off of the freeway, on my commute home. A distant view of Downtown Los Angeles through the beautiful hilly city of Eagle Rock.

It can be tricky to get an unobstructed view of an entire city that is accessible and there is a place to park your car. Somehow the stars aligned and I was able to get to the right spot, although I felt a bit like a fugitive in the pitch dark hopping guard rails, ducking through holes in fences all the while worrying I would step on a raccoon or a homeless man at any moment.

I had my camera set up in the car ahead of time so that all I would have to do is level the tripod, turn the camera on, find my shot and click on my time lapse controller. Once I started shooting I glanced at the time. 7:10. I knew I had a little time to kill so I did the math:

My time lapse controller was set up to release the shutter every 3 seconds. One image every three seconds = 20 images / minute. If I stayed for 20 minutes I would have 400 images. 400 divided by 30 (frames / second) means I would have 13.3333 seconds of video. Most stock footage sites require 5 - 30 second clips. 13 seconds is a pretty good target.

There really didn't appear to be a lot of movement in the frame as far as cars driving, planes flying overhead, etc. but sometimes subtle Mise en scène can make for a dramatic time lapse.

Camera Body: Canon t2i
Lens: Canon EF-S 17-85mm @ 28mm
F-Stop: 5.6
Shutter: 2sec
Interval: 3sec

Here is a still image from the final time lapse

In processing the time lapse I realized that I made one huge mistake. I want to make a point of this because it can be a common mistake, and can completely ruin your time lapse. The lens I was using has an image stabilize feature on it that MUST be turned off to shoot time lapse shots. The stabilizer is fantastic for shooting video. Without it shooting handheld is nearly imposible. However, during a time lapse it makes subtle movements in the framing and you end up with a jittery time lapse that looks like it was shot with a k-mart tripod during a stampede.

If you have this problem, Adobe After Effects' "stabilize footage" can do a fairly good job of stabilizing your shot after the fact so that it is sufficient for stock footage. However, it can be time consuming and it will NEVER be as good as it could have been with a truly locked frame originally. Don't make my mistake! When setting up your camera for the time lapse, make sure to turn off the image stabilizer.

With that said, after processing this clip a few different ways, I decided to poop-can it. The quality just wasn't what I had hoped for. You can't win them all.

From a business perspective, this clip was not marketable enough to spend a LOT of extra time on, and my time could be better spent on other more valuable activities like shooting new footage, or processing and uploading footage from my back-log of raw footage. From an artistic perspective... I just didn't like it as much as I thought I might.

On to the next one!
Happy Shooting,
HDCineman