[eliallan]

Here's a montage of some timelapse stuff I've done recently with the k01.

I bough the k01 on a whim, mostly because it was cheap and came with the 40xs. I was thinking about buying the 40 Limited, but why not get the lens and a camera for just a few bucks more. And after the early reviews I didn't expect to be too impressed.

But this camera is awesome, and very likely the best ilc for timelapse currently on the market. Here's why:

1. Better metering than any other camera I've used. Unlike my dslr's the k01 uses the entire sensor to provide accurate consistent metering. This means I can get perfect unflickered exposures in Av mode. To do this with my k5,k7 or even the d600 that I bought and quickly returned, I would need an external trigger with programmable bulb ramping. Which would still require manually calculating exposure beforehand, not to mention added cost, complexity, weight, weather corncern, etc.

2.low investment, my most used timelapse setup is the k01 with Samyang 14mm lens, total cost less than $500. If this setup gets damged by rockfall, stepped on by mountain goats, stolen, rained on, or otherwise broken, I won't be too heartbroken. I won't be out a thousand dollar camera or a thousand dollar lens. This makes me feel way better about leaving the camera unattended for days at a time.

3.Great battery life, timelapse work is not very automated, manual exposure, manual focus, the only automation is the interval timer. Consequently I regularly get 800+ raw images from a single battery. I'm not sure any other mirrorless can match this, of course my dslrs can, but they cost far more and take up way more backpack space, not to mention looking very stealable.

4.looks like a cheap toy, and I don't think anyone would steal it.

5.very good internal intervalometer. I wish it had proper bulb ramping, but currently no camera has this internally, so I can't complain. Compare it to an NEX, which has no intervalometer, and no remote port.

6.build quality, for the money I paid for mine the build is stellar, despite its fisher price looks, its a brick. I wish it was sealed, but not having seals is not that big a deal, its held up to some pretty heavy abuse to this point and I'm not worried about it the way I would about an NEX or Rebel. When I'm timelapseing I typically cover the camera with a small plastic rain cover, this i has held up through severe mountain thunderstorms and -20 degree temperatures with no trouble.

7.IQ, the images this camera produces are phenomenal, better than my k5 in most cases. In this instance even the 12bit files are an advantage. The 14bit k5 dngs are slightly more workable in post, but when I'm working with a 1000 new raw files a day, that small storage savings is notable. Maximum IQ per megabyte.

Does anyone else use their k01 in a similar manner? How has your experience been?

[JinDesu]

Great time lapse. Love the sequence at 2:08 - from dark to light.
When I full screened the video on my 1680x1050 monitor, the video required scaling up to fit my monitor. Did you make the video in 1280x720?
The reason I mention this is because when I full screened the video, it automatically scaled the video and made it look a bit worse than when it was unscaled. Good thing I saw that the scaling was turned on, so I turned it off and the video looked fantastic as a result.

[snake]

who did the music?

[eliallan]

Thanks JinDesu, its done in 1080p but I didn't buy the pro account at Vimeo so they resize it back to 720 which likely does reduce the quality even before its scaled up.
The music is by Mogwai, from the soundtrack to Les Revenants. Mogwai : Rave Tapes : Out January 20th 2014

[manntax]

A-W-E-S-O-M-E !!

thank you for sharing .. although all the glory to the God who has created these beauties ! --manntax

[Homo_erectus]

That is really fantastic! Excellent work and thank you for sharing.

[jimr-pdx]

Magical, reminds me of the Tangerine Dream / Miramar DVDs. Besides the absurd closeout price the interval-movies was my motivation for grabbing a white K-01; only the K-3 can improve on its capabilities. Funny though, I've made no interval movies yet and surely nothing like this!

[dosdan]

.Great battery life, timelapse work is not very automated, manual exposure, manual focus, the only automation is the interval timer.

Are you using ME or AE during interval shooting? If you're using Av, that would be AE. With ME, the night-time part of a 24 hr shoot would be underexposed, wouldn't it?

Auto-ISO?

What Interval?

Have you tried "Interval Movie" instead of "Interval Shooting" (of stills). I presume there would be a quality loss, but it's Motion JPEG so it uses intra-frame (spatial) compression, rather than inter-frame (temporal) compression, so It should be OK. The quality loss would just be the compression rate used for Motion JPEG and a resolution loss compared to raw shooting, but I'm not sure if you'd notice it when downsized & played back in the destination video format & resolution. It would certainly be easier than developing 800 raw shots and importing the JPEG/PNGs into a video editor for the creation of a moving image sequence.

Dan.

[eliallan]

Thanks for all the nice comments everyone.

Dosdan, daylight shots with changing light are mostly on Av w/ f8 or so depending on the lens. None of the exposure modes will give me a good night exposure so thats all manual.
I've played around with the interval movie mode, and it is better than expected but still doesn't compare to RAw. its also nice to be able to pull the best stills from the sequence. The amount of space required is a minor inconvenience, The price of data storage is hardly an issue relative to the cost of all the other photography gear. I just recently picked up a trio of Silicon Power waterproof, dropproof, usb3 high speed, 1tb drives for $70 a piece, so I'm set for atleast a little while. The cost of good, fast lenses on the other hand, that haunts me.
The workflow is not as bad as it sounds, I import to Lightroom, develop the first image in the seqence and then copy past the settings to all the rest. There is also a Lightroom plugin that automatically curves the develop settings between keyframes, but usually thats unnecessary. I copy the settings for the whole sequence, hit export, go drink some coffee, encode the sequence in virtualdub, and within a few minutes I have a finished timelapse in lossless h.264.
I am very curious about how the k3 performs in this regard, auto hdr timelapse encoded to 4k resolution might even be better than my raw workflow. At 24mp I might find myself a lot more concerned about file size and processing time as well. But the k3 probably won't be finding its way to my door for atleast 6 months.

[barondla]

Amazing time lapse eliallan. All the work paid off big time. I know little about video and would like to know what ramped bulb is?
thanks
barondla

[RonHendriks1966]

This is great. I've doen some timelapsing, but not anyware near as beautifull as this.

So howmany shots did you make with your K-01? You can find shuttercount in RAW images. I do wonder if it's also good for 100.000+ images.

[mamethot]

Here's a montage of some timelapse stuff I've done recently with the k01.

Does anyone else use their k01 in a similar manner? How has your experience been?

I suggest you add your lovely time lapse here:

https://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/138-pentax-k-01/237736-add-your-k-01-time-lapse-here.html

I have been struggling to get good focus when shooting night scenes. I use 28mm, 35mm and 50mm primes with manual focus but rarely as sharp as what I saw in your shots.

Advice?

[eliallan]

Barondla, bulb ramping is when you use an external trigger to control the exposure in bulb mode and the trigger is programmed to adjust the exposure over the course of the timelapse. Sunsets for example might shift quite dramatically from 1/500 all the way down to 20 or 30 seconds as it becomes completely dark.

Ron, I'm at 22,000 shots on my k01. No trouble so far, but I might buy another k01 as a backup if a deal comes along.

Thanks for the link Mamethot, somehow I missed that thread. Focus is really tricky for astrophotography. Focus peaking helps a ton, but is still difficult at night. I've also found that none of my lenses, even my limiteds are exactly accurate with their infinity mark. So in good light, I've taken my lenses and very carefully in magnified live view with FP on, focused on a distant subject and marked the lens barrel with a new infinity mark. This helped quite a bit. Another issue is keeping the camera stable, and the exposure short enough to not streak the sky too much. I don't own a super heavy tripod and probably wouldn't want to carry it anyway. I've actually had better results with the camera just sitting propped up on rocks, than using lightweight tripods. Different lenses perform very differently at night as well. If your lens suffers from coma it might be awesomely sharp in good light and weirdly terrible at night. Aperture is very important for getting the light from faint stars but I've yet to see a 1.4 lens that actually performs well at 1.4, on the other hand some slower lenses are excellent at their max aperture. Most of these shots are from the Samyang 14mm@f2.8, the Da15@f4, Sigma 30mm@f2.8,da35mm@2.8. The sigma is an interesting example in that its absolutely terrible at 1.4, and still has very visible coma at 2.8, but has a certain look that makes it seem better than it is. Rendering is just as important at night, the sigma is a flawed lens that renders beautifully, the contrast between the sharp center and soft edges makes the center appear sharper than it really is. Just something to think about.

[DDoram]

Great time lapse work!

Dale

[mamethot]

Barondla, bulb ramping is when you use an external trigger to control the exposure in bulb mode and the trigger is programmed to adjust the exposure over the course of the timelapse. Sunsets for example might shift quite dramatically from 1/500 all the way down to 20 or 30 seconds as it becomes completely dark.

Ron, I'm at 22,000 shots on my k01. No trouble so far, but I might buy another k01 as a backup if a deal comes along.

Thanks for the link Mamethot, somehow I missed that thread. Focus is really tricky for astrophotography. Focus peaking helps a ton, but is still difficult at night. I've also found that none of my lenses, even my limiteds are exactly accurate with their infinity mark. So in good light, I've taken my lenses and very carefully in magnified live view with FP on, focused on a distant subject and marked the lens barrel with a new infinity mark. This helped quite a bit. Another issue is keeping the camera stable, and the exposure short enough to not streak the sky too much. I don't own a super heavy tripod and probably wouldn't want to carry it anyway. I've actually had better results with the camera just sitting propped up on rocks, than using lightweight tripods. Different lenses perform very differently at night as well. If your lens suffers from coma it might be awesomely sharp in good light and weirdly terrible at night. Aperture is very important for getting the light from faint stars but I've yet to see a 1.4 lens that actually performs well at 1.4, on the other hand some slower lenses are excellent at their max aperture. Most of these shots are from the Samyang 14mm@f2.8, the Da15@f4, Sigma 30mm@f2.8,da35mm@2.8. The sigma is an interesting example in that its absolutely terrible at 1.4, and still has very visible coma at 2.8, but has a certain look that makes it seem better than it is. Rendering is just as important at night, the sigma is a flawed lens that renders beautifully, the contrast between the sharp center and soft edges makes the center appear sharper than it really is. Just something to think about.

Wow very informative post and a great idea for the infinity mark. This one should go in a tips and tricks thread