A Metaphor for Sacramento

In January I traded in my old Canon 550D and bought myself a new Panasonic GH4. To test its capabilities and to help familiarise myself with the GH4 I decided to do something a bit different - a time lapse!

I decided to keep it as simple as possible, (or what I thought was simple). I went for a vase of flowers as that seemed like a good place to start honing my painting skills. I hadn't painted since school, and even then I had been pretty bad at it. 

Like most things I guess skill improves with age even if you don't use it often. I felt like I'd never painted before, and yet, thanks to my endless hours of colouring fanart with Photoshop, I had quite a good idea of how I would blend the paint. The finished product actually surprised me, I was honestly expecting to sit back and see a crude 5-year-old's painting.

As for the timelapse, the GH4 has a pretty user-friendly interface, but if you're switching from Canon to Panasonic like me it will take some getting used to. For instance - I'm not used to my DSLR continuousy autofocusing during shooting. I assumed once I'd set the camera up and started taking my time lapse stills that the focus would stay the same. I was wrong - I found this out the hard way.

I set my shooting interval to 10 seconds and record mode to 'Stop Motion Animation' rather than 'Time Lapse' as this allowed me to work indefinitely. I got to work painting and hoped for the best.

After attempting to import my 1000+ stills into a Photoshop timeline (this was a dumb idea but I wanted to try it anyway) I realised Premiere Pro is in fact more efficient at processing time lapse images, and on my second attempt I managed to import all of my stills and place them on the timeline each at 2 frames duration. 

Going back to the autofocus problem - watching the time lapse back showed me that the camera had switched between focusing on the canvas to focusing on the back of my head, to my dismay. I spent half an hour deleting the out-of focus-frames and cursing myself.

Finally I sped up the remaining footage, getting it down to under a minute, added some ukulele music, colour corrected and rendered the project. After a few problems with interlacing in the first few exports I finally ended up with a finished product I was happy with. 

Things I would consider in future:

Make sure continuous AF is off and switch to MF (seems obvious now)

Capture smaller jpegs to reduce rendering and export time

Ignore Premiere Pro when it asks 'do you want to change the sequence settings to match the footage?' (this is a trap and will cause much heartache)