video thumbnail 21:15
Overnight timelapse on a deserted island: full equipment stack

2019-04-19

[public] 118K views, 5.36K likes, dislikes audio only

channel thumbAlphaPhoenix

Ever wish you could extract one day of nature from the world and play that frame on a loop? I do! and I've been trying to figure out the best way to take full-day loopable timelapses for a few years now.

As good weather aligned with a pre-planned hiking trip, I had the awesome opportunity to film a timelapse from Santa Cruz Islands, in Channel Islands National Park off the coast of southern California. Other than the ranger station on the island, I don't think there was a permanent human structure within 20 miles of my camera, and Ventura was behind me to the north, so the southern sky was DARK, and the night sky was awesome! The camera ran for a total of 25 hours and 52 minutes, and I spliced the footage back on itself to create a looping day-long timelapse.

I'd been meaning to make a video about shooting 24-hour timelapses because I've done a bunch now and it's a really satisfying technique, so here it is! The full tutorial! I'm going to go through the entire process, front-to-back, that I used to create this timelapse, starting with planning and location selection before I left the mainland, and ending with post-processing and video looping in daVinci Resolve.

In between I'll hit everything about physically recording the timelapse, including my equipment setup, camera settings, weatherproofing, and mounting. Once you've got more than a thousand raw files, It also takes a solid day to edit (largely AFK lightroom rendering time but still...) and I go into my complete day-to-night-and-back timelapse workflow. Hope you enjoy!

I really love the technique so if you film such a timelapse, let me know cause I'll want to watch!

Music Credits:

I Dunno by grapes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...)

http://ccmixter.org/files/grapes/16626

New Land by ALBIS is licensed under a Creative Commons license


putting the camera in aperture priority
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the aperture ring a few notches at sunrise and sunset
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locking the aperture at 2 8
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wrap it all the way around the focus ring and aperture
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use an external intervalometer
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wait for a minute and 20 seconds
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remember to lock the intervalometer
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turn the back screen to minimum brightness
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take out the regular battery
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insulating the camera against the sun
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remove all this foil
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blend those two time lapses together in a video editor
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getting a feel for the night time process
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eliminate the weird halo artifacts you get from applying lots and lots of clarity to the edges
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got two complete sets of edited images
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put both sets of pictures on the timeline on top
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made a manual 3 frame temporal blur by copying the daytime footage
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cut off any bad frames at the start or end
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cut the time-lapse to length
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mounting the camera in the wind
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AlphaPhoenix I'm Brian Haidet - PhD in Materials Science, but I'd also describe myself as artist, maker, and Hawaiian shirt enthusiast. On this channel, You'll find my side projects and favorite physics demos - I hope you enjoy!
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