Operating the eMotimo TB3 during a time-lapse shoot

- Every time lapse system or slider that you're gonna use is gonna have some type of control unit. I've seen dual joystick systems, I've seen people use laptops. Me, I'm all about simplicity, and I know how to rock a Nintendo Wii. (laughs) I am quite good at this, my son and I play Disney Infinity all the time, I know how to use one of these things. Now, this is not an actual Wii controller, here, but once we connected this, you see that it's actually controlling the unit. - And it makes futuristic robot sounds. - Yes, yes. Which is pretty cool.

Now, the way the system works is with the controller, you just push the C button to make the initial connection. But you have to be careful, Rob. You sort of had that accidentally, like you sorta let your hand go to the side, and it was moving a little bit, you've gotta be careful. Usually when I'm shooting, if I'm not using it, I hang it by the strap, straight down so it doesn't introduce. Cause this is a 360 controller, it's got a joystick and it's got a gyroscope. - Yeah, that's the thing that's kinda funny about it, is just tilting it left or right will actually move it. - So, on the side here, is an actual update screen. Now, once it's connected, you'll see that it offers the option for different moves.

And we could do a New or a Reverse. Now, Rob, the Reverse is actually starting at the end and setting it - Okay. - and then moving to the other side. - Okay. - That way you start at the end and you go to start, so when you trigger it, you actually save batteries cause it ends up at the right spot. It doesn't have to go set it, go to the end, - And then come back, right. - Yeah, so if you're concerned about batteries, that Reverse one is actually kinda smart. - Cool. - Now, besides a 2 Point Move, you could do a 3 Point Move, and what's the benefits of 3 Points, versus 2, Rob? - Well, 3 is more than 2, Rich.

(both laugh) No, in all seriousness, having sort of an intermediate point is gonna give you different creative options. Instead of going from the beginning to end, we can come through and say, "hey, you know what, we're gonna make a move," take some shots and and move to another point. - Yeah, so as it goes across here, we could actually stop in the middle, maybe recompose the frame, and then as it gets back towards the end it will pan and tilt down. - Absolutely. - So it just give you some flexibility. Alright, I'll go with the basic 3 Point Move here, but we'll do the Reverse option. And you see it's pretty simple, it's just saying okay, Up and Down to change that, and then when you're ready, push the C button, which is the one on front.

So I'll just push the C button to select it, it's stored. Now it says get to the initial position, so we've actually got this backwards, here, because normally we'd be standing on the side with the screen, looking at it. - That's why when I turn this way, it's going the opposite way. Cause it would assume that we would be looking at the screen, but we've oriented it for you. But the joystick, you could set that and frame it. - Ok, so basically-- - And it does sound like a robot. (laughs) - Just so I understand this, we're basically saying, go to this point, let's program this point, and then we'd set it up at that point? - Yeah.

- Go to the next point, program our position, and everything there, go to the third point and do the same thing. So we're basically storing camera position, the block position - Yeah. - then we can say "go," once we've stored those points? - Yep. And if you look at the screen there, We've set it to the first point, and it just says press the C key to store it - Yep. - Now move to the next point and it moves at a reasonable rate. - And again, you wanna be careful of the cables that they're not getting in the way of the actual - Yep. - belt itself.

- And I can make multiple moves here, so I'm just gonna take it part-way down the rail, - Okay. - even out my hand, and then maybe frame up the shot. Now, normally you'd usually be looking through the viewfinder, or the LCD display, to get it set, but we're just doing this for the basics here. Hit the C key to store that. - And then we're gonna go to our third point. - Yep. And we'll take that a little further down. It'll actually push out of the way, it's surprisingly good. Cause the cables are a little bit rigid, it tends to not get stuck. But let's say we wanted to go to there, and we panned a little bit, and we wanted to go up.

- Okay. - Alright, and if you see on the screen there, we could press the C button again, to store that. Now, we've got all of this, but we have to type in the interval. - Okay. - And this allows us to control how often it takes a shot. - And that's why we connected that intervalometer cable earlier, to the camera. - Yeah, and the idea here, with the interval is that since this is an external intervalometer, you need to take your shutter time and then really add a second, or a second and a half, so if I was doing nighttime time-lapse, I'd be shooting like a 30 second exposure, so I'd set that to, maybe, every 32 seconds.

Because we would be doing a daytime time-lapse, maybe it's a quarter second shot, or less, I could use a one second interval. - Got it. - So, let's dial that in, and you notice that you can go even decimal amounts, so extreme precision, which is pretty cool, so I'll go one second longer, tap that in, and now we set the move duration. How many frames do you want? And notice, Rob, it's doing that math that none of us like to do. It's telling you that, oh, if you shoot 300 frames, this is gonna tell ya how long that's gonna take to actually shoot.

- So 300 frames in this case, at a one second interval, 1.1 seconds, we're gonna be about five and a half minutes. - Yeah, it's gonna take five and a half minutes to shoot that time-lapse. But it's nice to know how long you're gonna be standing - Yes. - out in the cold or the dessert with the shot. - Okay. - And when I'm doing nighttime time-lapse, and you're starting to do 30 second exposures, that goes to hours. Like a move could take three hours. - Right. - Alright, we trigger that, and store it, and now the static time. This is the amount of time that it stops moving. So, what's the benefit of having it come to a gentle stop before it takes the picture? - Shake. I mean, if you're kind of moving, even the most stabilized systems in the world, when they kinda come to rest, you know there's some moving parts on here, there's cables, there's those kind of things, so by having it rest for a second, you're gonna minimize that camera shake.

- Now I could step forward and backwards through this. You'll notice with this interval, you could actually go all the way down to Video Mode, and that's gonna do a true real-time movement, which is pretty cool, but I'll just set that back to the one second here, 1.1. It's kinda cool, you can go forward and backwards, just using those two buttons. There's the move duration, it remembered it from the last time, which is cool. I've got the static time. - So how do we get started? - Well, now ramping. - Oh yeah, that's a good thing, too. - The ability here, with ramping, Rob, is if you wanted to sort of ease into the shot, like have a pause and then start to move.

- Yeah, this is kind of like easy-ease in keyframe land, right? So where, if you're doing this on the computer, you would kind of adjust your interpolation, same idea here. - Yeah. We'll store that. We can set any static at the beginning or end, if you wanted to have a static stopping point. - Hold for a second, right? - Yeah. And now, it's just gonna go back to the starting point. Now, we were already there, so if I push the C button here, and it's ready to go, I'll just start it. And the program is now running. - And at this point, Rich, what do you do? Do you go sit down on the rock over here, - Yep.

- have a drink, and let the camera do its thing. - Now this is only a five minute move, so it wouldn't take that long, - Right. - but the coolest thing, Rob, about this is that it's repeatable. - Yeah. - So when this move is done, you push the button, it could run again. - Well, that's actually a really good point, Rich. Sometimes when you do moves like this, especially as you know, the environment changes, or something like that. On a shorter time-lapse, you just pull the card, watch what you got and go, you know what, I need to adjust this middle camera position, so it's tilted up, or down, or whatever, a little bit better, program that in and then everything else about the time-lapse will be exactly the same, you'll just have a little bit different framing.

- Which is cool and I've actually used this to shoot at interesting times, where we shot before sunset and then after sunset, and combined them together. It really opens up some pretty cool things. And you're gonna wanna check out 4K Vegas, a film from lynda.com author Keith Kiska. Keith has a cool way of using this, and he'll intercut between daytime and nighttime time-lapse to put that all together. Alright, well you see it's running, it's pretty straight forward. Make sure you take this, I would hang it off the end, or hang it on the tripod, so it doesn't add any extra movement. You want that to go straight up and down, so it doesn't take control.

It's pretty simple - And make sure your batteries are fully charged before, especially on longer time-lapses, before you begin, cause there's nothing worse than getting, you know, four hours into a time-lapse to realize that in, you know the last two minutes, your battery died. - Yep, fresh battery in the camera, fresh battery here, and it takes control and it runs. So, pretty cool thing there. And again, this type of solution works for both stills, for shooting time-lapse with the shoot-move-shoot, you see it's moving and stopping for a second, for each shot, or you can use it for video shooting. And I think, because it's versatile like that, this is a great addition to your kit.