What You Will Need
The list of basic equipment you will need is quite small. As I said earlier you may be surprised to learn that you probably own a lot of it already.
To produce a time lapse you will need the following:-
To produce a time lapse you will need the following:-
- A DSLR or CSC.
- A tripod.
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- A Neutral Density (ND) filter (optional but preferable). These filters reduce the intensity of light entering the camera and give you more options for long exposure times. This can be particularly useful in the case of day-time time lapse photography when it is not always possible to achieve the desired exposure time without one. You can buy ND filters in a variety of increments from 1 to 10 stops. For every stop the amount of light entering the lens is reduced by half. Buying one that is somewhere in the middle of that range, e.g. a 4 stop filter is a good starting point.
- Adobe Lightroom©. Software used throughout the workflow to process individual shots and to produce the final video.
- Panolapse©. Software used throughout the workflow to smooth transitions between individual shots taken under changing lighting conditions and to reduce flicker.
- Video editing software. If you own a reasonably recent PC (with Windows Vista or newer) you will probably have Windows Movie Maker (WMM) pre-installed. If not, it is free to download. It's a perfectly good, easy to learn, basic video editor that will be sufficient to allow you to combine your time lapses into longer film sequences and to add such things as music, titles and some special effects. For Mac users there is iMovie which, like WMM, is a great starting point. Lightworks is a well specified video editor famously used to edit a number of Hollywood blockbusters. The free version allows you access to most features but restricts you to 720p uploads. PC and Mac versions are available. You can compare the free and pro versions here. If you are happy to pay then Magix Movie Edit Pro is also superb and comes in a range of specifications and prices to suit every pocket. There are plenty of other perfectly good free and paid for video editors available too. Just use Google to help you find them.
- If you get really into time lapse photography then, as with most other forms of photography, the sky is the limit in terms of the range of equipment you can buy and the amount of money you could find yourself spending. Since this site is more concerned with just getting on and doing it we will leave these matters for other sites to cover.