Hyperlapse Loop [39th of 52 Timelapse Project]

This week again I decided to do something, that I haven’t done before. Here’s a looped hyperlapse around a fountain near my home. It wasn’t so easy to shoot, since there are stairs on the two sides of the fountain. However, the shooting and postprocessing was quite simple. So now watch my shot and below find out what I’ve done to make it easy to stabilize 😉

I’ve already shot on this location a few times. I knew, that stabilization can be hard, because my fixed point is the middle of the fountain and the water makes it hard to track. I wanted also to try a new setup, so I put a gimbal on my monopod 😉 This setup is really nice for stairs shot, where using a tripod can be really difficult. Of course you can shoot handheld, but shooting water on a short shutter speed isn’t the best idea.

The most important thing that gimbal does is keeping the horizon level. With a tripod or handheld, you can really precisely aim the fixed point, but the roll axis rotation is something that is hard to notice.

The results straight out of camera were pretty good, I would say it was usable. However, I still decided to stabilize the position of the middle part of the fountain sphere. As I said, standard AE tracking doesn’t work very good here. It was just 75 pictures, so I decided to adjust the position manually, going frame by frame. The result is very nice now 🙂

To make the perfect loop I shot a few more frames, than a full 360 degrees around the fountain. I cut my footage around the middle (in the part, where I wanted it to start), and changed the place of those parts (I’ve moved the left one to the right, and right one to the left). Now, I’ve got the perfect loop at the end of the shot, I just need to adjust the middle part (where the shot acutually starts and ends before the cut). I put there a cross dissolve for 2 frames adjusting the position of those frames to perfectly match each other. It’s harder to notice, when the transition for the loop is around the middle of the shot, not at the end.

That’s it 🙂 Hyperlapse loop shots are something quite popular, maybe you’ve got some in your portfolio? Share that on my Facebook group: http://facebook.com/groups/timelapse.hyperlapse

See you next week!