Startrail Timelapse Technique

Hey,

I'm wondering if anyone knows how the startrail timelapse sequences were made from the video below (starting at 2:38)? Is there a specific program that can do this automatically or is it done manually by stacking 2 images, then 3, then 4, etc... followed by putting them all into a timelapse.

https://vimeo.com/1746​20220


Thanks!

Heya,

So, that's not just one program doing that. They used a wide fast lens and a motorized track that moved the setup forward very slowly and took photos over the course of hours for each shot. That is several days worth, and thousands of photos. The star trails took the most processing and they probably simply spent more time in post stacking those last frames to keep luminosity of the previous frame so that it would stack and show trails. This is days of work, in processing and days of work in capturing. I'm just guessing. They claim they used LRtimelapse for some of the processing but definitely not all.

Here's a quick tutorial from start to finish on how to do star trails for basic still images:

http://petapixel.com …ils-from-start-to-finish/

To make it a time lapse, of course, takes more work and more processing. Beyond me I'm afraid. Hopefully someone else can point you to a good resource on how to take star trails to time lapse.

Very best,

The effect you see (star trails that can are initially "bright" behind the star but gradually go "dim" at the end of the trail) can be done using a stacking program called StarStaX which is specifically made for stacking stars and dealing with star trails.

The "video" is a series of time-lapse images being combined to make the movie. So really you would use StarStaX to process the individual frames where you want the special effects. It can process the frames which allow the trails to "grow" and but has a feature that stacks in such a way that the most recent frames gets full brightness and each preceding frame is just a tiny bit dimmer.

You could do this in Photoshop by setting the opacity of each layer to be mostly, but not completely, transparent... suppose I set opacity low (say 10%) so now the layer is "90% transparent). The layer below is also set to 10% opacity so I see 90% of it's light (but not 100%) and I see a combined 9% of the layer below that (3 deep) and just keep going... eventually the opacity would get to the point where after a dozen layers or so there's little point in stacking further because you couldn't see enough of the bottom layer to be worthwhile -- but you get the idea.

Anyway, StarStaX can automate a lot of this for you.

Many of these clips require several hours worth of data capture. Either they had several cameras going at the same time or they needed quite a few (moonless) nights to capture all of this (or maybe a little of both.)

Perfect. I was hoping for an explanation like this. Thank you!