Hey forum goers! Nuocmam let me know that he posted my video here and I'm glad you guys like it! I checked out your forum and there is a lot of reefing talent here I see.
The camera I used to shoot the time lapse footage was a Canon T2i. Pretty much your average but great for the cost DSLR. And from the looks of it, there are many people here that have DSLRs as well. I hope to upgrade to the 5D mark ii within a couple of months. Footage was shot with the kit lens (18-55mm).
I used a cheap intervalometer (remote with timer) to shoot the time lapse stuff. Here is a link to the remote, and I'm sure they have Nikon versions of it as well.
Amazon.com: NEEWER® Timer Remote Control RS-60E3 For Canon XS XSi T1i XT XTi: Camera & Photo
I'm a firm believer in saving money where I can, and this remote, although cheap, works perfect for shooting time lapses.
All I did to shoot this movie is set up the camera on a tri pod, wait for the lights to turn on, and had the remote start taking pictures every 2-3 seconds until the corals were open (anywhere from 30 minutes to 2-3 hours). This left me with about 700-2500 pictures per shot, which I then edited in Lightroom. The only editing I did, actually, was cropping them to a 16x9 ratio (for the HD widescreen resolution of 1080P) and reduced the resolution from a million megapixels to 1920x1080, which is 1080P. This helps reduce the file size from 20 mb per picture down to less than 1mb.
Lightroom allows you to crop an unlimited number of photos at the same time using the sync feature, so it literally took seconds to edit the photos. Then, I exported them at the resolution I wanted.
After I had the cropped/reduced photos, I opened them in a program called Virtualdub. This program is perfect for time lapses as you just have to open an image with a number (i.e. Blasto1) and all other files in the folder with subsequent numbers (Blasto2, Blasto3...Blasto2405, etc) will import automatically. Then I just compressed the video with Virtualdub (easy to do) and exported it as an AVI (movie) file. I repeated this process for all 10 or so shots of the corals and merged all the movies using Windows Movie Maker (still the best simple HD video editor in my opinion!).
So in short:
Take photos with remote timer->Lightroom->Virtualdub->Windows Movie Maker->Youtube.
If you have any other questions, please let me know. I will be happy to explain further! If you have a DSLR camera, I HIGHLY suggest buying a cheap remote timer for it. Very easy to use and you can get some stunning results.
