(upbeat music)
- Let's just cut right to the chase.
I'm Canadian, which obviously means
that I ride a moose to work,
live in an igloo and I eat a lot of Canadian bacon
or as we call it, bacon.
But one of the most important things
that everybody knows about Canadians
is that we love maple syrup,
so when I found out that there was a company
called syrp making photography equipment
I was ecstatic.
Now when I found out it didn't have anything
to do with maple syrup I was a little disappointed
but I'm still really excited to give this sucker a try.
(upbeat music)
As you can probably tell,
it's starting to get pretty cold here in Edmonton,
so I thought it would be pretty cool to get outside
and do something today,
so we're gonna do some time lapses,
but we're gonna add the syrp genie mini ii
into the mix, so we can actually get some motion
in those time lapses.
Now a quick primer, this is the syrp genie mini two
and it is basically like a little turntable.
You put your camera on top of it
and it will turn it.
If you take two of them,
I'm gonna have to lose the gloves for this one
and you attach these with this little bracket,
one on the side and the other one you attach to the bottom.
Now I've got something that almost looks kind gimbal like
and you can do tilting up and down with this one,
and panning side to side on this one.
Now that I've got it all put together,
let's go shoot a time lapse.
(upbeat music)
Now for those of you who don't already know
a time lapse is essentially a video of time
being fast forwarded.
Typically it's done by taking a succession of pictures
and then playing them back in a sped up fashion
or taking a video and just literally fast forwarding it.
Which I guess it makes sense, it's a video
just a succession of pictures in the first place.
Now there a couple of reasons why,
you might want to shoot a time lapse.
The first of which is to show the passing of time.
One of my favorite uses of time lapses
is in the show Breaking Bad,
they constantly did really phenomenal time lapses
in between scenes to show the passing of time.
Not only does it work as a story device
but the other reason you might want to use it,
they can be really visually stunning.
So if you're ripping through B roll
and it's just suppose to look impressive,
a time lapse might fit in perfectly.
(upbeat music)
Okay so I came out here to the Alberta Legislature grounds
thinking that I was going to be able to get
a lot of people moving around and walking
and that kind of stuff,
but apparently it's too cold already for people
and nobody is outside.
So we're gonna have to try something else,
because one of the most important things
about any time lapse
is you have to have movement within it.
Now sometimes you can get away with doing just
the clouds moving by or something like that,
but the clouds aren't really moving.
There's really nothing happening here
so maybe we'll try something else.
We're still location scouting at this point.
There's the high level bridge just across the street here
and I think if we set up there,
we can get some kind of cool traffic time lapse thing
and get all the cars whooshing by with some blur.
Let's try that.
All right, I think this is gonna work for us,
I hope it's not too loud though.
So unfortunately I wasn't rolling at the time
but I'm hanging out on this corner
and this bicyclist comes by and hits a patch of ice
and slides, slams into my gimbal,
knocks my camera over it.
Almost goes falling down the bridge.
One of my ND filters fell down,
so I'm gonna have to figure out, how to go get that.
So it's this corner here,
you can see it's kind of icy, coming around there
and he just slid right into where I had
my gimbal set up and knocked my camera right into there
and if you really look down there,
there's my filter down there,
so I think I have to go over to those big stairs over there
and climb down and then I can get back over here
so I can go get my filter.
Maybe this isn't the best place for me to set up.
As far as I can tell, everything is still working.
The guy on his bicycle was okay.
I'm gonna have to go figure out how to get this ND filter.
You have got to be kidding me.
Here we go.
(slow rhythmic music)
So the filter fell from up there,
down to the ground here, so we'll see if it survived.
(slow rhythmic music)
There she is.
Looks like it might be okay.
Wow, I am thoroughly impressed.
Let's just give a quick shout out to Freewell filters
because your filter just survived a drop,
from up there.
Upon further inspection,
there are a couple of really nasty cracks in it,
but I think it's still usable for the most part,
especially at like wide apertures.
Should be okay, nice job Freewell.
(slow rhythmic music)
Okay I officially found the spot,
we got the bridge back there,
which is kind of a cool backdrop
and then in the water right now,
we've got like these big circles of ice
floating through that's causing movement.
Movement is important for time lapses.
So I think this should turn out okay.
I really hope so.
Before I shot this, my gimbal battery died.
My camera battery died, mid-shot.
All I have to say is, (beep) this video.
But I'm still gonna finish it.
Because you gotta finish it.
(upbeat music)
I got it all set up.
I got the control cable plugged in so the actual unit itself
is gonna be what's telling the camera when to take photos.
So I think for this shot because I want to mainly focus
on the fact that there is the big bridge in the back.
I'm going to zoom in a little bit and focus on that
and then get my settings based around that
and then we'll choose the motion.
Now in order to get the proper amount of movement
I've kinda decided that I wanna have
about a one second exposure
and that's gonna blur all of these ice floes
that are going through the water.
So I'm gonna need a filter for the front of this
because I can't get it dark enough.
So first things first, I pull up the app
and I connect to both of the units
and it'll show you which one is the pan one
and which one is the tilt one.
Then if you go to the create content panel.
The time lapse and video function are not available.
I'm pretty sure that's if you have one unit connected
and they have some pre-set thing.
But we're gonna go to the key frame function
and then there are bunch of automatic ones
that are pre-set for you, if you wanna go that way
but we're gonna click new set-up.
Then by using the joystick on the screen,
I can move the camera.
(upbeat music)
Like a kid in the candy store.
So we set our start point
and then we set our end point.
So now that we've got our start and end point selected
we can choose what kind of video we want
at the very bottom there.
Right now it's set to video
but I'm gonna change it over to time lapse
and hit okay.
Now at the top we've got some new functions.
We can choose our record time,
our interval time and our play time.
Now you wanna make sure
that you keep your interval time longer
than your shutter speed.
Right now my shutter speed's set to one second
so we're gonna set that to longer than one second
in this case.
Now one of the cool things,
is that if you hit this play button on the right hand side,
you can actually preview
what the move will look like in the end.
Hopefully we don't get too many runners
coming across the bridge and shaking it.
I think that looks pretty good,
so now we hit button to reset
and then we hit record and it will start taking photos.
Now one of the things that I really like
about the genie mini ii, instead of using a gimbal
to try and do this, is actually that you can close the app
and it will continue shooting.
It will finish what it already started.
With a lot of the gimbals if you close their app
all of a sudden the shooting would just stop,
which I thought was really annoying.
One more little tip you want to be in manual focus.
First of all you don't want the camera focus hunting
for every single shot.
It's gonna be flipping back and forth
and your time lapse is gonna look like a blurry mess.
Second of all, when the genie tells the camera
to take a shot, it doesn't necessarily give it enough time
to catch focus unless your focus is blazing fast.
So I've actually tried it once with the auto-focus on
and it didn't work at all,
it wouldn't take any photos because it's like
hitting the shutter button
but only long enough to catch focus,
but it didn't actually get to take the photo.
And now, we wait.
This is my least favorite part for sure.
(gentle music)
All right, so our time lapse just finished shooting
and I'm really hoping that it turned out okay.
It's starting to get a little dark out here,
so maybe closer to the end it might be a little bit dark
but I've ways to deal with that.
Maybe I'll talk about it in another video.
One of the things that's really hard
about time lapses for me is that you do put in
so much time just sitting around waiting for it to finish
and sometimes it just doesn't work out the way
that you thought it would.
So regardless of whether this one turns out or not,
I've used the genie mini 2 on a couple other ones
and I was really happy with the results.
Like I said, especially against trying to use something
like a gimbal.
I've just had bad luck with that in the past
and this seems to give me much better results.
So hopefully this one looks good.
All that's left to do is take it back home
into the computer, process the files in Lightroom
and then pull it into Premiere,
where I can stabilize the little shakes and stuff like that
but if you guys want to see a more in-depth look
on how I process photos in a time lapse,
let me know in the comments section below
and on that note I'm gonna leave you guys
with the final time lapse,
whether it's good or not, I'm just gonna play it here.
So thanks so much for watching.
If you're interested in the genie mini two,
I will leave a link in the description.
Make sure to leave a comment below
and let me know what you thought.
Hit that subscribe button and like button
on your way down there and I'll see you next time.
(upbeat music)
Remember before how I said
that I really didn't like the part
where you wait for the time lapse to go?
The worst part of any shoot or anything that you do
is tear down, 'cause all the fun is already done,
now you just need to tear all the gear down and go home.
I have to walk up those damn stairs.