So for anyone who was following on social media during my last trip, you would have seen lots of pictures of my camera while I set up a bunch of time lapses. I was experimenting and seeing what works, what doesn’t work, what I like and what I don’t like.
The GH4 has a fantastic time-lapse function built in and I had the Edelkrone motion unit with me, which also makes it really easy to take time lapses. So all you have to work out is what shutter speed you want to shoot at and the interval at which you want to shoot.
Your shutter speed will decide how movement looks in your time-lapse. I find a one-second exposure gives me just the right amount of blur and doesn’t overexpose with my ND filter dialled to the max :)
If you want less blur, but still have a bit of it, go for a shutter speed of 1/6.
Then there is the interval. I find a shot every six seconds works well for landscape time-lapses, which ends up being most time-lapses!
The other thing I learnt is that when you’re shooting anything with a slider, you want to have something in the foreground. You’ll notice for example in my video of the time-lapse out the window in Wan Chai, you don’t notice that it was done on a slider until you see the window frames come into, well, frame. You need to have an element in the foreground, close to the camera, to accentuate the movement otherwise it can be too subtle to be noticed at all.
You’ll notice in most of the sideways moving sliders I always had the ground or something in the foreground so that the viewer can see that the camera is moving.
I’ve also created a short tutorial below about how to take your images and then put them together in FCPX, enjoy :)