Posted by Paul DeCesare on April 20, 2011 at 1:05 PM
He used a 5D Mark II but I don't thing he revealed the len(es) used, as far as I've read. He talks about where he hiked and what it took to get the images that later created the footage in a blogpost here.
Honestly, the toughest part is having patience to sit there for hours while the self-timer does its thing. To get Milky Way shots like that, it takes a 30 second exposure at f2.8, ISO 3200. Then you post-process them in a batch in ACR to pull out the brightnes of the nebula clouds, etc. And of course the last step is to import them into QuikTime Pro, and QT will build the footage for you, at 30fps. So if you put 3 seconds in between each 30-second exposure, that means 1 second of video takes 16½ minutes to capture. You can use any camera for timelapse, but for these night shots you need the low-light capability of the 5D2 or 1Ds MK3, etc. Actually, a classic 5D would be perfect, it's probably better at low-light capture arguably. Remember that HD video is very small resolution-wise, only 1920x1080 (compared to the 5616x3744 on a 5D2) so it does't take a huge sensor to get HD video, but again you need a FF sensor to capture the Milky Way adequately. Funny, the video world talks about massive 2K and 4K HD cams which cost $100K... if Canon can figure out how to process RAW images into video (it'd take more than a DIGIC 4!), our FF DSLRS can already crank out 3.7K video. Right now you have to do that one frame at a time. Interesting to see what the next 5 years will bring. We're already shooting 720p HD video on the iPhone and Flip. It's just a matter of time!
Beautiful video--theres a ton of timelapse out there but this is one of the prettier ones ive seen (nice music too). Takes a ton of patience,and even more time to create something like this, ive just been dabbling with timelapse and its very tough to really nail--even in this well crafted video i can see some slight technical problems just because i know where to look for them. Its kind of sad that this only gets 2,000 views but a video of a baby acting like a baby will get 3,000,000 or so...
Posted by Nick Bristol on August 8, 2011 at 8:14 PM
Discussion
3 repliesStunning Video You Tube Link
Honestly, the toughest part is having patience to sit there for hours while the self-timer does its thing. To get Milky Way shots like that, it takes a 30 second exposure at f2.8, ISO 3200. Then you post-process them in a batch in ACR to pull out the brightnes of the nebula clouds, etc. And of course the last step is to import them into QuikTime Pro, and QT will build the footage for you, at 30fps. So if you put 3 seconds in between each 30-second exposure, that means 1 second of video takes 16½ minutes to capture. You can use any camera for timelapse, but for these night shots you need the low-light capability of the 5D2 or 1Ds MK3, etc. Actually, a classic 5D would be perfect, it's probably better at low-light capture arguably. Remember that HD video is very small resolution-wise, only 1920x1080 (compared to the 5616x3744 on a 5D2) so it does't take a huge sensor to get HD video, but again you need a FF sensor to capture the Milky Way adequately. Funny, the video world talks about massive 2K and 4K HD cams which cost $100K... if Canon can figure out how to process RAW images into video (it'd take more than a DIGIC 4!), our FF DSLRS can already crank out 3.7K video. Right now you have to do that one frame at a time. Interesting to see what the next 5 years will bring. We're already shooting 720p HD video on the iPhone and Flip. It's just a matter of time!
Nick Bristol
Lone Rock, WI