Time Lapsin' - Vol 2

For my second time lapse attempt with my Olympus E-410 I went for sunrise.  Thanks to the nifty (and free) Sunrise Sunset Lite iOS app from Kekoa Vincent I knew that dawn would be at 6:38am and sunrise would be at 7:05am this morning.

In retrospect, the time lapse might have been more interesting if I actually had my camera pointed toward the sun.  But the landscape is pretty uninteresting looking to the east, so I opted for a view of the Philadelphia city skyline, looking to the northwest from my roof.

I looked up some tips for sunrise/sunset time lapse settings.  From what I read in online forums, the contributors seemed to be divided into two camps:  aperture priority vs manual everything.  Manual made sense to me since you wouldn't want any drastic variations from photo to photo.  A couple people suggested a rule of thumb of using an f/16 aperture with ISO 100 and 1/100 shutter speed for a clear sunny day.  I decided to give those settings a go for my time lapse.

I was up on the roof by 6:15am.  I took a couple of preview shots using aperture priority (and slow shutter speeds due to it still being dark out), because with the settings I mentioned above you're not getting much light.  But I stayed the course - and about 100 shots later (with one shot every 4 seconds) I still had nearly pitch black photos.  I also realized that my netbook's power save settings kicked in and disconnected the camera at one point.

Determined to keep taking shots until I could see the light of day on the resulting photos, I shot from 6:41am to 8:15am, and ended up throwing out the first 200 shots (and keeping the last 712).

Once I had all of the photos loaded into VirtualDub, I tried several different frame rates (10 fps, 15 fps, 24 fps, 25 fps).  I ended up going with 25 fps because the movement of the clouds and shadows were smoother than with the lower frame rates (and with 24 fps, the vocals on the audio track kicked in right at the end, so I went with 25 fps to end the video a little earlier in the song).

I also installed the xvid codec and compressed the video this time. Without it, the resulting AVI file was 4GB. With it, 50MB.

The audio track is the same as yesterday, "Johnny" by City City.  I'll probably use City City songs for all of my videos, since I don't think they're all that likely to sue me.

P.S. Anyone know how to force an embedded YouTube video to play at a specified resolution? If you select the 640x480 player, it defaults to 360p. If you go up to the 960x720 player, then it's 480p. But I want to use the 640x480 player and preset it to 1080p.