Our most recent commercial gig just went live on Friday. It’s a 1-minute teaser for Nordstrom’s new pop-in shop, located on the main level of the flagship store in downtown Seattle.

The brief from the client was to create a timelapse of the shop from beginning of construction until it was ready for customers, for use on their social media channels. The installation would take place over a 7-day period, and we would need to have cameras running the whole time that work was happening.

At first we thought it would be pretty straightforward to set up a couple of cameras, set them running, and maybe visit them once a day to change batteries and sd cards. But it didn’t turn out that way. We picked a pair of GoPro Hero 3 cameras for the high overhead shots, and we learned that those diminutive cameras have a big appetite for batteries. Even when we added the optional battery backpack, they would die in under 3 hours of shooting time. Additionally, we wanted to capture snippets of live video for the edit, to add visual interest. So the result was we had to be on location the whole time. With all that time on our hands, I knew we would overshoot it, and we did.

We opted to shoot raw because the lighting in this retail location is very hot wherever pools of light fall from the tungsten spotlights that illuminate the store. Shooting raw gave us enough dynamic range to hold onto the highlights without losing the shadows. But wow, did that ever add a ton of processing time. Every timelapse had to be opened in Camera Raw, and saved out as a tiff. Then I opened the tiffs in Quicktime as an image sequence. Then I saved out the sequence as a ProRes file, and finally it was ready for edit. This turned out to be a massively time consuming way to go about it. Camera Raw is a dog. It processed each image in something quite a bit slower than real time, so if we had for example 3000 images in a sequence, it would take something like 6 or 7 thousand seconds to process the image into tiffs. That’s about two hours. So you can imagine: we have two dslrs often going simultaneously, producing all these tiles, and then we have to process them all. Not to mention the GoPro footage, which luckily was jpeg. So it was a real data management effort.

Unlike most shoots, we had lots of time to devote to data management, though, because the camera’s basically took care of themselves once we set them, and all we had to do was change batteries and cards.