HDRI TimeLapse

[suurland]

Just wanted to let you guys know I've updated http://www.cg-source.com with a new product. A full spherical HDRI TimeLapse at 14000x7000

Been a bit obsessed with creating this for quite some time, so hope someone can find it useful

More information can be found Here

/Thomas

[Morne]

Very nice!

[chriserskine]

looks nice.

is this a multi-cam setup?

tricky things to do.

I'm currently stitching one i shot last weekend with single d800e + shaved 10.5mm with automated tripod head. shooting raw with 192gb with of space in camera gives about 4500 photos, or 6.7 seconds of timelapse footage at the end.

[vlado]

It would be interesting to see a full 24h timelapse, especially the night time. There aren't many moonlight and starlight HDRIs...

Best regards,
Vlado

[suurland]

chriserskine: Yeah, there is more than one camera, but can't really say much more than that as I've spend hours upon hours finding the right setup.

Vlado: That would indeed be interesting but just creating these 20secs which is covering 20minutes took 2,9tb of storage, so if had to do a full day timelapse shot at the same speed I would need 209 tb!!!!

Also shooting 24hours would be a bit hard, surely I would have to shoot straight to a computer as there isn't any cf cards big enough, and changing cf card in the middle of the shoot is something I would like to avoid. And this would require a massive raid as the raw files are pretty big and there would be A LOT of them. And what if it started to rain after 23 hours?.. or a bug decided to land on the lens.. Or connection to the camera would drop out.. Or what about getting power out to the hill top far away from everything.. And what if the clouds would be boring that day, or maybe no clouds at all.. And probably other factors that I haven't even thought about that could mess it all up.

In other words, don't expect to see a 24h timelapse, but sunrise and sunset should be possible

/Thomas

[chriserskine]

Can i ask how your measuring dynamic range? and if your kind enough the how many photos is in each bracket and spacing?

I'm looking some of my hdr's in picturenaut and I'm getting between 12 and 60ev. generally shot the same way. (9 shots, 1fstop spacing)

and looking at the timelapse hdr that i've just been processing. it was shot between 3pm and 6pm (sunset) at the start of the shoot i'm getting 12ev and by the time the sun goes down i'm getting 33ev. there was no ramping so over-exposed at the start and under at the end.

as for speed of your timelapse. i think you'd be better off shooting every 5 sec's rather than 2.

I'm surprised your getting this far and still finding power an issue. a little custom cabling and either sealed acid or large lithium batteries will keep your sorted for a good 3 or 4 days. card space on the other hand isn't easy to solve. I had a go at trying to dump photos while timelapse was going... not good, just crashed the camera.

anyway well done.

[suurland]

Can i ask how your measuring dynamic range? and if your kind enough the how many photos is in each bracket and spacing?

I'm looking some of my hdr's in picturenaut and I'm getting between 12 and 60ev. generally shot the same way. (9 shots, 1fstop spacing)

and looking at the timelapse hdr that i've just been processing. it was shot between 3pm and 6pm (sunset) at the start of the shoot i'm getting 12ev and by the time the sun goes down i'm getting 33ev. there was no ramping so over-exposed at the start and under at the end.

I meassured it using HDR Expose, but make sure there isn't any black pixels in the hdr, what will make a huge ev number. 60evs sounds like a mistake, a sunny blue sky shouldn't be much more than around 13ev's. But if there is a ground with something dark the number will be higher. But it can also be calculated by hand

as for speed of your timelapse. i think you'd be better off shooting every 5 sec's rather than 2.

That depends on what look you want, if you want skies flying by really fast or if you want something more subtle just giving motion to the clouds.

I'm surprised your getting this far and still finding power an issue. a little custom cabling and either sealed acid or large lithium batteries will keep your sorted for a good 3 or 4 days. card space on the other hand isn't easy to solve. I had a go at trying to dump photos while timelapse was going... not good, just crashed the camera.

I'm not having a power issue, I was talking about shooting 24 hours to a computer. And that computer would need a ton of storage probably a raid, and if you want to power a laptop with a raid storage on a battery I'm sure you would need quite a lot of batteries!

/Thomas

[tricky]

I recall years ago we bought a license of, but never actually used, a piece of software called 'Terragen' (or something like that. It generated skies with clouds etc. This was before the age of digital cameras etc, so having a nice, clean, unobstructed sky was useful for images and animation. I'm not sure if that software exists anymore, but perhaps something like Vue could 'generate' time-lapse HDR type stuff much more easily than capturing the real thing.

Of course, the real thing will always look 'better', but there are issues with file size etc as you are finding. Its annoying enough using a 125MB exr HDRI to light a scene (which is why, more often than not, we end up using the vraysun/sky system - its quick and easy and we can control exactly where the shadows are)

[chriserskine]

I meassured it using HDR Expose, but make sure there isn't any black pixels in the hdr, what will make a huge ev number. 60evs sounds like a mistake, a sunny blue sky shouldn't be much more than around 13ev's. But if there is a ground with something dark the number will be higher. But it can also be calculated by hand

/Thomas

ok that makes sense, I've got some black in the images. I'll have a look at them without it.

chris