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Timelapse Video Demo

On to page four, we have the interval timer. And so this is new in the 5D series of cameras, well, strike that. It's not new, it was in the 5DsR. It was not in the 5D Mark III. We got a little video, so let's show you a little bit about what this feature is all about. One of the other new features in the 5D Mark IV is the intervalometer. Previously, you've had to attach one of the cable releases and program that in, but now we have it all built-in to the camera. And I'm gonna shoot a short little time-lapse right here using the intervalometer, page four in the shooting menu. And for this particular one, we're just doing a fairly simple one here. You can disable it, you can enable it, and down here at the bottom it says Info/Detail set. So you gotta hit the Info button to go in here and hit the details. Now I'm gonna shoot a fairly fast one, which takes a picture every one second. So I'm gonna get that set in. And for the number of shots, we can set a number anywhere from one or actuall...

y two, up to 99, and then from there it's just unlimited. And we're gonna go with unlimited, because I need more than 99 shots for this particular one here. And so let's hit OK. Come down here. And so now we're ready to start. It's got an interval of one second for an unlimited number of shots. I'm gonna go ahead and get this started, and it's clicking away right now. Jake's gonna start walking down the beach, and we'll see you in a bit. Have a nice walk. All right, Jake has returned, and so it's time to finish off our time-lapse. He's out of shot now. And so I'm just gonna go ahead and turn the camera off, because that's just the easiest way to go ahead and deal with that. And so now I just want to make sure that some of my photos came out looking good. And so yeah, he's walking up and down the beach there, and we'll turn that into a time-lapse in software afterwards. So these are, let's see, I took probably about 300 images there of him walking down the beach, back and forth. I'm gonna have to use a software program to compress that into a final video. The nice thing is that if I want to jump in to an individual frame and fix something, or I want to make some adjustments on the lighting I can do that in here. But it's fairly cumbersome, because we have the camera shooting and firing shutters each time and we end up with a whole bunch of photos. But it allows us a lot of information to work with if we need to make adjustment to those final photos. So this is a traditional system for shooting time-lapse and it's a system that I've used many, many times before and it works really well, and it's nice to see it's built into the camera, because it makes it really easy to shoot. All right, we've shot the time-lapse and now it's time to build the little video. So I've got all my images loaded up into Lightroom here. And usually when I'm making a video from time-lapse, I'm gonna want to do some adjustments to my images. Now I've already made these, but just what I've done real quickly is I've cropped them to a 16x9 aspect ratio, because that's the standard for most of our HDTVs these days. So I wanted to crop it into that aspect ratio. And then I wanted to make a few little adjustments on the shadows and the saturation and the contrast of the image. And in some cases, maybe if there was an errant little problem in an individual photograph, I could go in and fix that up, potentially, if I needed to clone an element out that was a mistake or if there was a dust spot or something. And so in this case, I ended up with, let's see, down here at the bottom it says 259 images. And then I exported these, sized for the types of files. For HD video, I wanted to have it 1920 in pixels by 1080; if I wanted to make a 4K video or a different size, I would size it appropriately from there. And then I'm gonna export all of those out of Lightroom into a file where I'm gonna use a video editing program in order to compile them and put them together in a video. And so let's go ahead and take a look at the final video. And so this is our time-lapse here. This is shot over about four minutes, with a picture every one second. And so the nice thing about this style of time-lapse is it gives you great individual control. If there was one frame that something happened that I didn't like and I wanted to go in and I wanted to clone it out, fix it up or anything like that, it gives me a lot of control. But it's a little bit more work, because you end up with all of these files to work with. But it does give you the greatest editing capability. So if you really need to take full control of your time-lapse, this would be the mode that I would recommend. A lot of fun, good stuff to use. So enjoy using that. So that's the basics on the intervalometer. And just a couple more time-lapses for you here. So this one I was using a motorized slider. So I was moving the position of the camera to get a little extra dynamic motion going on in the frame, which is one of the keys to making a compelling intervalometer series nowadays. And in this case, I shot with the camera on a tripod, and I did a little bit of a Ken Burns affect. I did a little pan back on the camera. And that was all done in post production. The beauty of shooting these individual photos is that you can shoot with such high resolution. You can kind of move your frame within the frame for final video around. We talk about 4K is kind of the new big thing. Well, your camera shoots 6.7K when it's shooting in still photos, and so you have a lot of room to work with and play with. So as you dive into the intervalometer, you see the info details set. You press on that, and you can get in to set the interval, the time between the shots, which for most intervals is probably gonna be between one and 10 seconds. That's where most people are shooting your basic intervalometer series, but it needs to be wherever it needs to be. And then as you saw in the shots, anywhere from two to 99, or unlimited. And so it's a great way to be able to do it without the cable, the cable release, that we had to use on all the previous 5D cameras. And so now we have all of that built in. And at this point, there is no reason to buy the cable, not even really activating it is an issue anymore. So you don't need the cable for the intervalometer, at all. It's all built in. Next up is the bulb timer. Now for this to work, you gotta have the camera in the B setting, all right, so it's gonna be grayed out if it's in any other setting on the camera. And so the reason for the bulb, as I mentioned before, if you need a shutter speed longer than 30 seconds, you can program it into the camera how long a shutter you want to leave open in this case. And so if you want to leave it for two minutes, you can go in, you hit the Info/detail set and then you can go in and you can dial in exactly how long you want to leave it in there. I'll warn you, probably not a good idea to leave your sensor exposed and on for more than 15 minutes. You may be able to push it a little bit. You might be fine, but that's probably the outer boundaries of where most people are gonna go with that camera. Anti-flicker, relatively new. This came in with the 7D Mark II. So let me talk about the flicker problem that we have with fluorescent lights. So fluorescent lights are not consistently on in their power. They flicker in their brightness. And if you were to look at one second, this is what it looks like as far as the peaks and valleys of how bright that light is. It could be at 120Hz or 100Hz, per second. Now what happens when you have a camera that shoots at seven frames per second, and it's just shooting on its own accord, wherever that shutter is ready to fire is where you're gonna get. Now do you get a bright version or a dark version? Well, that's just kind of the luck of the draw as to where you get images. And if you shoot with a burst of images, there's a good chance that every one of those is either gonna be a little bit brighter or a little bit darker than the next image. And you get this mess of images back that all need to be adjusted, slightly differently, so that they look the same brightness. So when you turn flicker reduction on, what it does is it compromises just a little bit of speed of shooting, and it basically looks for the next peak in which to shoot. And so it's always gonna be shooting with the brightest, best light that you have, the most light that you have, but it may slow down your frames per second from seven down to six frames per second. And so I found a light that flickered, and I took four images. And I'm gonna go back and forth through these images and see if you notice the brightness difference between these iamges. There's definitely a big difference brightness between two and three. And the camera is on manual, the camera has everything set up so that every image should be exactly the same brightness. I turned flicker reduction on, and it's not exactly the same, but it's really, really close, as I go back and forth between these four images. And so if I needed to grab a group of these images, it would be much, much easier to work with with flicker reduction turned on. And it only turns it on when it senses it. And so I will admit, I flip-flopped, if that's a good term, I've changed my mind. I've evolved, my opinion has evolved. I used to think this is something that you can turn on when you have a flicker problem, but now I just don't want to deal with flicker issues, at all, and I'm willing to give up one frame a second. Now, that's me personally, I'm willing to give up a frame per second so that I don't have to do edit hundreds of photos that have flicker issues. I would leave this just turned on. And so in most cases I think that's gonna make most people's lives a lot easier. Mirror lockup, so with an SLR camera, one of the downsides is that we have a mirror in the camera. Let's take a look at that mirror. There we go. So when you shoot a picture under normal circumstances, the mirror goes up, really quickly, and it causes a slight vibration throughout the entire camera, and that happens to be right when your camera is shooting a photo. And this can be a special problem when you are shooting at slow shutter speeds on a tripod. The solution to solving this vibration problem is to turn Mirror lockup on, enable this. Now your shutter release works in a slightly different manner. You press down once, and it will lock the mirror up. You have the exact same vibrations that you had before, but you wait for a few seconds for those vibrations to settle out, you press the shutter release a second time, and the shutter fires without any motion of the camera, at all. So this is very important for people working from a tripod with a slow shutter speed. Let's take a look at an example. So I'm shooting at one-eighth of a second. Let's take a look at the sharpness. That's not so good on sharpness. Why is that? Well, we're at one-eighth of a second, mirror lock-up is turned off. Let's go ahead and turn mirror lock-up on and see how much sharpness difference. And so that's how much sharpness difference it'll make. And one-eighth of a second is right smack dab in the middle of the vibration zone. And this is where you are most likely to get vibrations, and it's because anything longer, the vibrations tend to settle out and you don't notice it, faster shutter speeds, well you just don't have it because it's a faster shutter speed, and it's stopping the motion. And so in and around an eighth of a second, fifteenth, quarter, two, one second, anything like that, is where mirror lock-up on a tripod is gonna have a big deal. It's not as big a deal hand-held a lot of times, because your hands will absorb some of that vibration, but can be a big difference for tripod shooters. So normally, I love this, but I leave it turned off until I need it.