Blackmagic 4k Time Lapse

​I was in New York City visiting a friend over the weekend, and figured I'd bring along my Blackmagic camera. He has an apartment on the 86th floor, so you can imagine the view. I took over 30 different clips of the city: locked off, panning, tilting, panning and tilting. Whatever I could think of. Then I remembered the camera also has the ability to do time lapse. So, I figured I'd give it a try.

I'm no expert when it comes to time lapse, I've only done 1 other time lapse shot before this attempt. That was with my gopro camera, and it came out pretty nice, so I was excited to see what I could get shooting raw in 4k.

To do this type of shot right, you'd probably have to sit and make some exposure tweaks as the light changed. I didn't really bother to do that. I just set the camera up, pointed it in the direction of the sun, set the interval, hit record and we went inside to have a beer and watch some tv.

Time lapse settings can be found in the recording menu.

I set the exposure for the sky, and set the interval for 1 frame/sec. The exposure was fine for the sky, but the buildings got quite dark as the sun set, as you would expect. That was fine, because I was really interested in capturing the sunset. I wasn't sure of the interval, but figured I'd rather have too many frames rather than not enough. And that ended up being the case. After doing a color grade pass in Resolve, I brought the footage into After Effects and sped it up about 6x. I also added a little bit of grain. And, there was also the sensor artifact to deal with. The Blackmagic cinema cameras are known to have a dark spot when the light is super bright. Like the hot spot of a light bulb, or looking straight at the sun. I believe this has been fixed, and an upgrade to my camera's firmware should eliminate this in the future. But, it was in this shot and was easy enough to paint out.

I'll post some of the other clips once I have them graded and edited. But you can watch the completed time lapse video (graded, cropped and with grain) here:

Blackmagic Design Production Camera 4K (EF Mount)

Rokinon 35mm f/1.4 AS UMC Lens for Canon EF