[WONTFIX] Finer granularity for the intervalometer and AEB

[Joachim Buambeki]

Hi,

I have already discussed this with Alex a while ago and he thought it it was unncessary, but I still think it is a worthwile addition to the repertoire of a timelapse shooter to have finer control over the intervalometer than the 1 second steps we have right now.
I hope this open thread will help to convince Alex by having others supporting the idea.

When shooting fog, or fast moving clouds streaming across a mountain top you usually choose 1-2secs so the possibility to fine tune that would be extremely useful. Going from 1sec to 2 sec means that the clouds move twice as fast which is not really ideal when 1sec is just a tad too slow for the final product.
Trust me there is use for this - people actually pay good money for a device dedicated just for that:
http://pclix.com/   (you may also read this: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/PanoToolsNG/message/50622)

My proposal for an advanced intervalometer would be something like this:
.4 , .5, .6, .7, .9, 1, 1.2, 1.4, 1.7, 2, 2.5, 3, 3.5, 4, 5, 6, 7, ....

The extreme fine granularity at the lowest intervals is important because each camera has a different max continous RAW speed that has to be determined, at least for the 5D2 JPEG you can shoot with full speed (3.8fps) continously AFAIK.

I know this a bit more to click trough for those who don't need it, but for those who need it makes a world of a difference. Perhaps it can be disabled for those who can't be bothered.

(Please don't advise to speed up in post, as the results can never be as good as a proper interval, especially when shooting clouds or any kind of water where twixtor or whatever you use will just produce unreliable or bad vectors)


AEB is something else that needs finer granularity for timelapse purposes.
With my 5D2 the finale HDR detoriorates too much somewhere around 3EV spacing. Since it is highly impractical to shoot 5 or 6 images per bracket it would be good to just cover the needed dynamic range with as little pictures as possible.
Sometimes 3x3EV just isn't enough, but 3x4EV gives a only mediocre HDR, so something in between would be nice to get just that extra stop that is necessary to cover the dynamic range.
Again, this isn't particularly useful for still photographers, but for timelapse shooters.

Thanks for listening!

[a1ex]

... you have FPS override.

[Francis]

You can always download the source and add those values in under shoot.c. If I remember correctly when I was messing around with the intervalometer all the times are in msec so fractions of a second are no problems. It's definitely something that you could add in yourself with a little searching.

[a1ex]

The intervalometer syncs with real-time clock, which only reports seconds, so it's not that easy. A clock with sub-second resolution that uses msleep would drift quite a bit.

But for timelapse with small intervals, FPS override has very good timing.

[Francis]

Ahh, that makes sense. Yes FPS override has become my time lapse method of choice for most situations. That is any interval under 5sec. No rendering hundreds of RAWs or JPGs is a very good thing. The only thing it lacks is the resolution to crop/zoom.