For those that have a Canon DLSR and use a remote intervelomter or timer how are you using it in the air? I'd like to do a 6 minute time lapse in the air. When I have the timer on the ground set at every 2-3 seconds the screen is constantly between a screen that says "busy" or the actual still that was just taken. Are you just living with it and using every 4-5 seconds for 6 minutes to get like 2-3 seconds of video?
Yes, there's no workaround for that. Make sure your "review" time is set to OFF, as that helps a little. But you still lose the live feed whilst the photo is being taken by the camera.
Same with Nikon if you are sing live feed. Alternative is not to use live feed and mount another standard FPV cam. I made up a rig that I can strap to the lens. While not exact it gives a good framing reference which is good enough... Not sure on the Canon's since it's been awhile since I had them but depending on what resolution you are shooting, Raw or JPG, you may also find that the buffer fills up and then you will get a busy until the buffer writes to the card and then can accept another image. On my D800 I can shoot at about 1 frame per second or a little slower in RAW only. Any faster and the first 15-16 frames are fine and then the buffer is jammed.
Dave, I'm curious to see whether a traditional time-lapse will work from the copter. I hope your GPS is dialed in!
thanks for the feedback. There's only one way to find out Steve!!! Didn't you like the GH3 for the built in intervelometer? I thought you were going to tr it on the copter? Gary, good idea, I forgot about turning raw off and trying it with JPEG's. That might help a little bit.
Yes, the GH3's intervalometer is part of its allure, but I just use it for ordinary stills. I don't like being bothered by having to fire off a shutter release from the ground. I just get my 1 or 2 (or however many) stills from the card, and toss the rest. Memory is a renewable resources that way. I'm curious whether the various post-production stabilization stuff we have might work to align the many frames of a time-lapse so that it would be usable. If you're in the air for 10 minutes shooting a time-lapse, I can't imagine your frames are going to be anywhere close to accurate enough SOOC. And while JPEGs are probably faster and certainly are smaller, if you're shooting once per second or slower, buffer overruns are never going to be an issue for you. As for me, I never shoot JPEG format. It's just too confining. If nothing else, the AWB calculations on cameras are almost always wrong, and that's just not an issue with RAW files.
Magic Lantern is software only, but is a whole can of worms. That's the RAW video hack stuff. And it's super unstable on the 7D, so I wouldn't even bother.
I am not talking about the raw part which you are right is not very good yet but the other options that it offeres are very nice. I shoot a lot of HDR and it comes in handy every time. The raw I am not into as I don't think they have that down yet to use reliably on jobs.