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Time-lapse of about 1500 RAW images taken between 22:00 and 01:00 on E6 between Skedsmokorset and Kløfta on a freezing November night.

Tommy Johansen in Veidekke contacted me last spring to create a time-lapse of some of their construction work. In November, on the very last night of pavement work on the E6, everything finally fell in place. I drove the 30-40 minutes from Oslo, past the barriers and signs, onto the closed part of the highway (ignoring honking and blinking lights from other cars thinking I was asleep/nuts/etc) and got to work.

It was a cold night, and taking time-lapse photos takes time, so I was wearing the same as when it was -43°C (-45°F) at Svalbard. Toasty!

Camera settings

• Nikon D300 and 17-55mm f/2.8
• ISO 1600, NEF (12-bit RAW, 4288 x 2848)
• 1/15 second exposure, f/4.5 aperture
• 2-second intervals and 999 frames, using the D300’s built-in interval timer
• Tripod: Manfrotto 190DB and 141RC

I wanted the big machinery and the people to be in focus, just the opposite of typical time.lapse movies where the moving part of the image is blurred out.

Keeping the machinery and people sharp required a short(ish) shutter speed to freeze the movements (luckily the machines move very slowly, but the Veidekke employees were more speedy), and using the a big aperture to avoid raising the ISO too high, but still getting a little depth of field. It would have been nice to be able to use a camera capable of higher ISO without more noise (when is the Nikon “D900″ coming?), or a lens with a larger maximum aperture, but my settings worked out ok.

Here is one of the photos:

D300, 17-55mm f/2.8 @ 22mm, f/4.5, 1/15s. Larger version.

Editing the photos in Lightroom

I used RAW (Nikon NEF) because I wanted to be able to adust as much as possible in Lightroom afterwards. Taking the photos took many hours, and as this was the last roadwork project in 2009, missing the white balance or exposure would be.. well, unfortunate. Post-processing was quite standard: I used my Lightroom develop preset for Nikon D300 as the starting point, found a white balance that worked well with all the images in the series, adjusted the levels, etc.

The lighting was standard highway lighting: Quite yellow. I put the tripod below one of the streetlights, both to have as much light as possible, and to be as far away from the next one as possible, eliminating reflections and glare.

As you can see, I panned to follow the scraper maching at 00:30 and also at 01:45 to follow the other machine. This was the scary part. I knew I had to pan very steadily, and I also had to start and stop the panning without screwing up any photos. I’m quite happy with the result.

At one point a big truck needed to pass where I was standing, so I missed a couple of frames around 00:58. I stopped the interval timer, grabbed the tripod and camera, jumped over and in between the middle barriers (traffic passing me at 100 km/h 1m away), the truck passed, and I ran 4-5 meters ahead to catch up with the “machinery caravan” and started the interval timer again.

Oh, and I did export the photos to JPEG after editing them in Lightroom.

With images taken quickly after another, Lightroom and the MacBook’s trackpad can be used to “scrub” back and forth, making the still images look almost like a movie:

Making the movie

I have previously used Apple Quicktime Pro (or “Quicktime 7″ as it’s called in Mac OS X 10.6.2 Snow Leopard), as described in Time-lapse movies with the Nikon D300. But for this video I wanted titles and a soundtrack, which is not possible using the “Open image sequence…” method.

So I bought Apple Final Cut Express. It has most of the basic functions in Apple Final Cut Pro, but at a price that mortals can afford ($199 vs $999). From Wikipedia:

Final Cut Express’s interface is identical to that of Final Cut Pro, but lacks some film-specific features, including Cinema Tools, multi-cam editing, batch capture, and a timecode view. The program can perform 32 undo operations, while Final Cut Pro can do 99.

A quick Google search for “final cut express vs final cut pro” might also be interesting.

Editing in Final Cut Express (FCE) is quite easy for using the basic functionality. I used Adobe Premiere on Windows a few years ago and FCE works much in the same way. I won’t go into the details of working in FCE, as Apple has some excellent tutorials.

One important tip: Before you drag in all the (JPEG) images into the FCE bin, set the default duration of a still image to something like 0.2 seconds – or whatever you think will work for your project: User preferences -> Editing -> Type a new value in the Still/Freeze Duration Field.

More?

See the video on Vimeo, and also on Veidekke CEO Terje R. Venold’s blog Terjes tanker.

Five-minute time-lapse movie of Vancouver, Canada.
Philip Bloom’s Dubai time-lapse.
Eirik Solheim has squeezed one year(!) into 90 seconds.

Comments, links to more time-lapse movies, anything else? Input appreciated!

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