time lapse help....

[copefan]

i'm making a time lapse film called the journey, its about my daily trip to work and back....... but i need some info......

i'll be mounting the camera on the dash of my car....... its a canon 814xl with an interval e adapter.... how would you focus the camera as i would not be able to alter this while driving?

if i set it before I set off and alway leave a set distance between any cars in front or should i set it for the max and take pot luck.....

russ
its the first moving time lapse if tried so i need some help.....

[Patrick]

The first thing you should do is zoom the lens out to the widest setting. Hyperfocal focussing is commonly employed to attain maximum depth of field. However, to use this technique, you must know the hyperfocal distances for all apertures on your particular lens. There are probably depth of field tables for super 8 lenses online that would have this information.

[Alex_W]

Hyperfocal distance is the focus setting of the lens where objects at infinity and objects at the nearest point to the camera are both in acceptable focus, according to Blain Browns Cinematography. If you set the lens at the hyperfocal distance, everything from infinity to half of the hyperfocal distance will be acceptably sharp.

Here's a calculator you can use:
http://www.nikonians.org/html/resources ... ocal2.html

There are others, just google around.

I believe the circle of confusion of super8 is 0.02mm

[Alex_W]

fyi, you can also calculate it yourselve, by taking the square of the focal length of your lens and then dividing it by the f-stop multiplied with the circle of confusion.

so for a 50mm lens and a f/8 and a circle of confusion of 0.001 inch:

First make sure everything is in inches or mm's. That doesn't count for the f-stop number, because this is a ratio, not an absolute number.

50mm is 1.97 inch. 1.97*1.97= 3.88
3.88 / (8*0.001) = 485 inch = approximately 40 foot.

So 40 foot would be the hyperfocal distance, and everything from 20 feet to infinity would be acceptably sharp.

Nice huh 8O

[vidwerk]

I'm sure you'd be fine if you left your camera's zoom to it's widest and set
your focal ring to about 30 feet.

vidwerk.

[gianni1]

Oh I've done this, but I gaffer taped a tripod mounted camera to the head rest of the front passenger seat. It was a silent Nizo S80. Checked the view through the lens while seated in the back seat in the parked car. Figured out how long the drive was supposed to be then calculated the frame rate so the film would end about the time I arrived.

Watford to Devizes about two and a half hours, about a frame every ten or fifteen seconds IIRC. Set the focus midway between infinity and not too far away (30feet sounds good) and started the camera when I departed. Had about twenty or so seconds left when I arrived. It was Kodachrome and it came out fine. Ought to telecine it...

Gianni

[Mitch Perkins]

Oh I've done this, but I gaffer taped a tripod mounted camera to the head rest of the front passenger seat. It was a silent Nizo S80. Checked the view through the lens while seated in the back seat in the parked car. Figured out how long the drive was supposed to be then calculated the frame rate so the film would end about the time I arrived.

Watford to Devizes about two and a half hours, about a frame every ten or fifteen seconds IIRC. Set the focus midway between infinity and not too far away (30feet sounds good) and started the camera when I departed. Had about twenty or so seconds left when I arrived. It was Kodachrome and it came out fine. Ought to telecine it...

Gianni

A neat trick is to stop the camera at red lights - makes it look like you sailed right through 'em, or encountered only green lights. At the very least it keeps the forward flow going un-interrupted.

Mitch