This timelapse film is a compilation of all the footage I shot from Principal Tower in the city of London.
Timelapse shooting and editing information and workflows are below the video.
Please do watch this edit on a big screen, there are so many details to take in.
A big thank you goes out to the team at Principal Tower for letting us shoot from their fantastic penthouse apartment!
I captured all of these sequences on Lumix and Canon cameras. You can find out more about what other tools I use on this page here.
Timelapse shooting techniques
The holy grail (day to night) sequences were shot using the Lumix system's automatic exposure leveling which I talk about here. It allows you to shoot in Aperture priority mode with auto iso and get a completely flawless, flicker-free day to night sequence. The only editing necessary is to add a color grade using my timelapse presets and to ramp the white balance from day to night and back.
The extremely long timelapse in this sequence spans almost 24 hours and consists of over 2,000 RAW files. It was recorded using the Lumix S5 and 16-35 f4 lens, with the camera plugged into an Anker power bank which kept the camera charged via the USB-C PD (power delivery) protocol.
Timelapse editing techniques
I edited all the timelapses using Lightroom Classic, After Effects and LRTimelapse 6, which is an absolute must if you're into timelapse. You can read more about LRtimelapse here.
Here's a general overview of my timelapse post-production workflow:
- Offload memory cards to an external SSD.
- Import the contents of said SSD to a new Lightroom Classic catalog.
- Run the Timelapse+ Studio plugin to automatically recognise and create collections of all the timelapse sequences.
- Colour grade all sequences with my timelapse presets.
- Use LRTimelapse 6 for the more advanced sequences where I need to ramp certain settings like white balance or exposure.
- Use After Effects to batch render the sequences overnight.
- Re-import the freshly exported Apple ProRes master sequences to stabilise if needed and remove birds etc.
- Do the same for de-noising using the Neat Video Noise Reduction plugin.
- Re-export the final master files and put them in an edit set to some nice music.
For the time slices sequences, I use the video workflow that I explain in this blog post here.
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