I recently attended PMA Australia, Southbank Melbourne. We stayed in an apartment block close by. I took some time lapse photos with my 5D Mk II from our 18th floor balcony. After a bit of experimenting I took 367 shots at 3 second intervals, f4.5, 0.7 sec exposure with a 24-105L set at 28mm. I then processed the RAW files in Lightroom, exported the images as full size jpg files 5616 x 3744. The resulting files were then loaded into Adobe Premiere Pro CS5. Then the trouble started, I have a i7 system with 6 gig of RAM and a NVIDIA GeForce GTX285 Video card, 3 HDD’s and my system almost ground to a halt. I wanted to pan and zoom as the images played through their time lapse segments. Even with my reasonably powerful system and CS5 with its new Mercury playback engine I could not play even 2 frames, no such thing as any sort of preview when loaded with 367, 21 megapixel images. So I basically set the zoom and pan settings, rendered the time line (which took about 15 minutes each time) made the necessary adjustments and rendered it again and again and again…, eventually I had my time lapse movie somewhat to my liking.
Southbank by night from Stephen Dyer on Vimeo.