Spring Break 2012 was characterized by a lack of beaches and a high chance of moose. Instead of going on Beach Reach like I have the last few years, sharing Jesus and pancakes with spring breakers, I spent the whole week way out in the country at The Ranch, which has some of the best fishing and hunting anywhere and which also happens to sit under some of the darkest skies I have ever pointed a camera at. So I did the only sensible thing you can do with a week like that. I photographed it.
I last visited the Ranch in 2008, and I have since taken down the video I filmed back then, though I am sure I will repost it eventually. This post is not about a video I made in 2008. It is about the one I made in 2012, it is called Ephemeris, and you can download the whole thing in 4K.
17 Timelapses In One Week
Over the course of Spring Break I shot more than 17 separate timelapses, which sounds impressive until you remember that shooting a timelapse is mostly just you standing next to a tripod for two hours doing absolutely nothing while the camera fires away on its own. Whenever the weather turned I packed up and moved. Whenever the light started doing something interesting I set up again. The genuinely hard part was not the shooting, it was deciding which ones made the final cut, because there are so many pretty locations out there and every single one of them looks good with clouds ripping across it.
The night ones are the ones I keep coming back to, though. You get out that far from a town, you point a camera up through some bare oak branches, and the sky just fills up.
Why I Shot JPEG
Here is the part that is going to make some photographers wince. I photographed all of this in JPEG instead of RAW, and I did it on purpose, to save space.
Think about the math for a second. One timelapse is hundreds of individual frames, 17 timelapses is thousands of frames, and I was out at the Ranch for a week with however much storage I brought in the car and no way to go buy more. RAW would have gotten me maybe five really nice timelapses. JPEG got me the whole week. You give up grading latitude when you do that and I am not going to pretend otherwise, but I would rather come home with all the locations than come home with a third of them.
Turning Photos Into 4K Video
Nothing I own shoots 4K video. Nothing most people own shoots 4K video, because it is 2012 and 4K is still a thing that happens in movie theaters and trade show booths. But here is the fun part about timelapse: a timelapse is not video. It is a stack of still photographs. And the stills coming out of a normal camera are already much bigger than 4K, so if you assemble them into a movie yourself, you get a 4K movie out the other end basically for free.
The workflow was Quicktime 7 Pro to turn each folder of JPEGs into a video file, then Adobe Premiere to cut those clips together into an actual film.
Where My Computer Gave Up
Premiere Pro CS5 handled the 4K images way better than I expected it to. My graphics card did not.
Playback would stutter and stall and generally act like the whole machine was about to fall over, and the fix turned out to be going into the Mercury Playback Engine settings and disabling GPU acceleration entirely. That sounds backwards, I know. You are turning off the thing that is supposed to make it fast. But whenever your card cannot actually keep up with what you are throwing at it, it stops helping and starts fighting you, and handing the work back to the CPU is slower but it is stable. If you are trying to edit something much bigger than your timeline was ever meant to hold, that is the first switch I would go flip.
Grading It In After Effects
Color grading and the touchups were done in Adobe After Effects using Magic Bullet Looks, which is where most of the mood in this film comes from. The clouds got contrast, the night shots got cleaned up, and the whole thing got pulled toward one consistent look so that 17 timelapses shot across seven different days in seven different kinds of weather feel like they belong in the same movie. That is really the entire job of a grade on a project like this.
Download It In 4K
I got the idea to put this out as a download from Tom Lowe and his new 4K film TimeScapes, so I have decided to offer Ephemeris for download at a full 4K resolution as well. If you happen to have a 4K monitor or a 4K projector, and I am aware that is roughly eleven of you reading this, I would highly recommend grabbing it at that resolution rather than watching the embed above. It is a completely different film when the stars are actually resolved.
Interested in having me film for you? Please contact me!