Astro Time Lapse - Zeapon Micro3 Slider

hello and great to see you back here on the channel I'm really excited to show you a new product that I've been using for a little while now and I just want to talk to you a little bit about this great slider now this is the zeppon micro three E1000 it's the newest what's known as a double distance slider from this company and a double distance slider simply means that it travels pretty much twice as far as this distance here from here to here because it has this Carriage that moves independently from the base it's belt driven and it's very very strong solidly built and it has a few features that I specifically want to discuss with you relating to Astro time lapse but first let's just have a bit of a look at some of the general specs on this particular model so this is the micro three I've also used the micro2 which is a great slider but this does have some significant upgrades I think it has overall a smoother motion and I think that's due to this new 45 degree angled track and you can see there that the carriage sits in there beautifully it's got the support which means it can take a very heavy payload and they say it can take 12 kilograms in payload which is an awful lot of weight so that is one of the things I really love about it the other thing I really like is this larger mounting base so you put your ball head where are we I've only got a fairly small one it just sits on there like says your screws on by the way it does have a quarter or a 3 8 inch thread and you can push that down and get it out of the way which is one of the things that I love quite a few sliders these days have that but it just hides down there under the way so when you put it in a bag or a case or something it doesn't grip and cut the edge but yeah there's a really big size here now they say this is about four times larger than the original contact so a little ball head like this doesn't matter but if you've got a big video head or something like that it does make a significant difference to the mounting options here the other thing that I really do love about this slider is the the new Motors now it's removable so easy just have a look at that now I have just made this into a manual slider so there's enough friction and force on that that you can just push this across with your camera on it if you want to do that now that's mainly more for shooting video certainly not for time lapse Stills which is what I really want to talk about but you can see that's what the motor it looks like it has a Sony npf battery which all of these devices run by and I really like that because I've got these by the truckloads I've got heaps of these batteries and the other thing I love about it is the battery life is Sensational so how quick is it to Mount you stick it on there like that flick up using hand tighten it up it is on and ready to go so I mean it couldn't be much more easy than that this is uh powered also by a USB input on the side there and that's something that's new and I think a lot of people will make use of that now this slider comes in three sizes it comes in 500 millimeter 700 millimeter and one thousand millimeters this is the 1 000 millimeter model so I wanted the the longest possible movement that I could get and that is it now the good thing is that the same motor Arrangement fits on all three sliders so I think that's a really good design idea now as I said it carries about 12 kilograms as a vertical weight but when you've got the camera up in an orientation tilted like this it takes about four kilograms or thereabouts which is pretty much straight up and down so the weight's coming down this way but if you've got the so water in a horizontal position like this the weight coming straight down about 12 kilograms that's an awfully heavy camera setup now the other thing that it comes with which is one of the things zeppon's really good with is carry cases so you can see here really nice carry case it's got the handle you can carry it around there's a separate case also for the motor section because the motor comes off so it just makes it a little bit easier to transport you can sort of modular the system a little bit now one of the big advantages of this particular system is the way that they've got these support rods and they they've had this on their slide as before but this one is improved and you know why because it's got a quarter inch thread there now what that means is that at the bottom here on this plate you there's a quarter inch thread on both ends and you can just stick any tripod I've got you can see I've got some manfrotto tripod plates there because the reason for that is when I'm mounting this for my time lapses I like a quick release plate I can just throw it on very very quickly um and and have it mounted on any tripod because I've got quite a few different height tripods little ones like this bigger ones like that so which that means you can put it at any height that you want but they've got these supplied rods that you can clamp down onto your tripod leg and just screw that in now they had a similar system before with the micro two slider but I didn't think that was as good because it had this little ball joint you had to push it in and then screw it down a little bit more fiddly and when you're out there in a field you want something that's really easy to attach and I think this system this new system is a lot easier to attach so the the big thing about that is that when this Carriage gets right out to the end and there's an awful lot of weight hanging down now if you had this tripod connector just simply in the center there all of the weight is going towards the edges it's quite easy to to get sagging and that's a problem I had with my old edelchrone system it drove me nuts because everything would go downhill this system has the supports on the end and I think it's quite an ingenious idea now one of the big features that I love about this particular system is the integration with the pan and tilt heads that's the screws on there like so now this is where that larger base comes into play because that's a much larger surface area and you can see there it really grips really well of course I've got the pan and tilt set up and I use this quite a lot let me just get it sorted put that on there like that this is very quick to set up by the way so if you're out in the field you want a quick setup and that just goes on there like so now I have a pan and tilt grab my camera I've got a quick release plate on there as well and suddenly have a look at that I've got this system set up and ready to go in no time at all again the npf Sony batteries fits in all of these so they're all exactly the same and then of course I can start moving the thing around and we can see there we can we can pan and we can tilt independently now I'm going to show you in a minute what the app does with these things and the app is pretty good it may have a little few little um idiosyncrasies let's call it that that some people will need to get used to but for the time lapses that I do which are predominantly Astro time lapse at night time using long exposures this system excels now I have to say that there's hardly any information out there on this system using it for time lapse in general let alone Astro time lapse just about all the reviews I've seen have been talking about this system used for video production now I actually do do use this system a little bit for video production where you can get those moving panning across the scene and you can make it using the ponds system here that it actually maintains the exact same field of view and that is really handy but that's something that I only use on occasions my big use is using this for time lapse so I want to discuss with you exactly how I go about setting this system up for shooting Astro time lapse firstly I mount this thing as I've suggested on sometimes on very low tripods it's pretty rare for me that I'm able to mount the slider here onto a flat tabletop like I've got here most of the time I need to put it on very uneven ground and so that's where the tripods come in handy I can adjust each end and I can get it nice and level now speaking of getting it level I always carry with me a little tiny spirit level which I just stick on the top of the slider rail here and adjust to suit and that makes it really easy for me to get the whole thing working quite smoothly so I work out my composition and the movement that I want to put into it then I can weigh down my tripods I can put sandbags or whatever else I want to put onto my tripods just to give the whole system a lot more support now the big thing that I love about this system is how I can integrate it with the inbuilt time lapse intervalometer in my Nikon Z6 cameras and it just works a treat now I've talked a lot about how I love the Nikon Z6 for time lapse well this integrates really well for it now I can even add the zeppon time lapse trigger into the system this is the device that zephon have come up with which goes on the top hot shoe of the camera up here like that and that operates with the camera without connecting any wires so it connects into the camera the the camera then controls the slider and the thing I love about this system is that well most systems let's put it this way you have to plug a cable into the camera and you set the parameters in the actual slider device but in this system we're using this time-lapse trigger I can actually control the slider Movement by what I want to do with the camera now why is that important to me well I do a lot of day to night time lapse and there are many occasions where I'm not too sure exactly how the exposures and everything are going to go and so therefore I can set the camera up to just use the inbuilt intervalometer and every time the shutter clicks after the shutter closes it will move the slider so that's using this slider in move shoot move which is the way most people shoot their Astro time lapses now one caveat with this particular system is that you need to set your camera into rear curtain sync mode which which is a flash mode in cameras and the reason for that is because it's it's able to calculate when the exposure finishes so there's a front curtain and a second curtain in a camera shutter system so the second curtain is what closes the shutter and when that second curtain closes this device knows that the exposure is finished and therefore it moves the slider now the the caveat with this is often when I'm shooting with my Nikon cameras I like to shoot an electronic shutter or rather than use a lot of a manual shutter releases on my camera now the problem with rear curtain sync Flash and this is nothing to do with zip on it's to do with with the camera system is that it doesn't work with electronic shutter so you need to be using a manual shutter which is fine it's just that I like to use electronic shutter on my cameras doing time lapse because I'm saving the manual shutter count it's as simple as that now one thing I do want to talk about is how I use this slider in a little bit different way and I've been doing this for quite a few years now to be honest with you so what I will often do is set my slider to travel very slowly from one side to the other now this is about a meter of travel a little bit more so if I set my slider to go from point A to point B and I set that to be a fairly slow travel say maybe two to three hours then what I often do is simply it'll just let it travel very slowly the thing I love about this system is that the app enables me to do that I've had similar Sliders in the past where the app wouldn't go slow enough to do that but in this case and you know some of you are thinking now that's not possible you're going to be shooting 10 15 second shutter speeds when I'm shooting Astro time lapse it's exactly what I do I shoot 10 15 sometimes 20 seconds shutter speeds and the time lapse Carriage is in continuous movement but it's so minor that the shutter speed doesn't interact and create motion blur in the image now that to me works brilliantly and and you're going to ask me well why would I want to do that in the first place why don't I just do the move shoot move well the reason is because in a lot of cases I just want the camera to do its own thing sometimes I'm setting up my camera the inbuilt time lapse mode that's not shooting Stills at all it's just shooting a time lapse movie and so that doesn't necessarily integrate so well with these other systems but by separating that and making a slider do its own thing and the camera do its own thing all I have to do is match up the actual time that it takes to start and to finish it's as simple as that now I'm going to show you some samples at the end of this video quite a few of them and you will see exactly what I'm talking about so I've got this zip on lab app on my phone and I click on that and now I just wait for it to connect to each of the devices that I have connected here ready to go and oftentimes it will connect automatically other times it needs to manually connect so let's just have a look it looks like everything is connecting there quite okay so I just press done and then we'll connect to the app itself and this is what the interface looks like so we have the slider here and we move it across one way and then we move it across the other way and we can set our actual waypoints now you can see the waypoints are here at the top so if I press for example a waypoint there I have now set that now if I want to change the parameters of where these devices are going I just move these wheels to wherever I think I want the device to go so let's just go to there I'll move the pan around this way and perhaps I'll move it up a little bit to there and then I press that as the B Waypoint and all I need to do to play that is to press the arrow down the bottom and it takes me back and initially it takes me back to the beginning of the motion here and then it will begin to play that and it works really well one of the other things that I do like is this little constant line here and that makes it Loop so if now if I press the go button you can see that it goes from one Waypoint to the next and then it will go back again so it's constantly looping all the way around and I can add up to six waypoints now one of the things that a lot of people didn't like about this particular app is the fact that the there is a stop between each of the waypoints now if you're doing video with this device then yes set does make somewhat of a difference because it stops through each of these waypoints but if you're doing time lapse it makes no difference because there's it's so slow and there's a stop and a gap between each photograph anyway that that does not come into the equation so I have quite a fairly complex moves because this is a three axis movement if it's just a single axis in other words just a slider on its own then really you're only using two waypoints an A and A B Waypoint and it works really really well very easy to connect you can walk away with the phone and it will still keep going so that is not a problem at all now one of the things that I often do as I mentioned is to use this slider to continually move across just crawl across at a very slow speed now how do I set that up in the app well let's have a look so I've already created my waypoints as you can see here so I just click on this little square down the bottom and it asks me which mode I want to go in I'm currently in video mode I'm going to go to Time Lapse mode it's called customized time lapse so I'll click on that and you can see here I can set up a number of parameters firstly the frames per second here I'm going to set that to 25 because that's what I always shoot with and let's just say I want to shoot for three hours because remember if I want this to be moving very slowly and I don't want the emotion below I need a fairly long amount of time it takes to get from one side to the other so I often shoot about three hour plus time lapse so let's have a look at that so to get to three hours you can see the waiting time down here what I want to do is work out how many frames I need for that now I think it's about 5200 let's try that no bit more than that 5500 it's a bit of a guesswork at this point okay five thousand four hundred sorry I'm just I'm just there we go 5 400 photos at 25 frames per second gets me three hours exactly now I'm not going to be taking 5 400 photos this app thinks I am you know why because I've set the shutter time to one second and the interval time to one second and that is the key to making this slider go so slowly it thinks I'm just taking these tiny it's taking five thousand photos to get all the way across I'm not I'm taking uh maybe 500 or maybe 600 or maybe 700 photos depends on my shutter speed but I set that inside the Nikon time lapse app and they just work beautifully as an integrated uh two separate units but they integrate because I've just worked out the total time I want it to go from one side to the other it's really as simple as that now of course you can connect both of these systems via the cable and it will work like every other system move shoot move and then you can set the app a little bit differently but the way I prefer to do it is the way I do it because I just love the inbuilt system in the Nikon and I've talked about that before but it has this gorgeous exposure smoothing algorithm built into it it's just wonderful and it also produces an inbuilt 4K video if I use the internal system if I just did it using the app here then that's not going to happen so that's something I always want so I've successfully shot this using this same system down to about one and a half hours from all the way from one side to the other still using long exposures of 10 to 15 seconds and I'm not noticing any motion blur and I've been doing this for years not just with this system I've used many other systems that just crawl along quite slowly and I've always had great success by using that method okay now I mentioned the zeppon time lapse trigger so let me just put that on here connect that up turn it on and that will now connect to the app as you can see here tap on that and that will now connect to the time lapse trigger you can see it says they're connected press done and we go back and I've still got my Waypoint set where they were before so what I'll now do is click on that little square down the bottom here but this time go all the way to the end and click on the camera and this is the camera mode so what I have to do here this is again very similar to what I just showed you I'll change my frames per second to 25 because it's what I always shoot with and then I will change how many photos I want to shoot now this is a bit different because all I do here is match up the amount of photos that I have just set in the camera so let's just say I set my camera to shoot 700 images all I have to do here let me get my glasses on is shoot 700. done and now that's going to tell me there you can see on the app it says that will take 28 seconds to play back so now that's quite a long time lapse but if I'm shooting an astro time lapse I want to see the stars moving across the sky that's exactly what I want and it works so so well believe me it really is absolutely awesome so all I do then is I press the round button down here which is the go button it then asks me to press the shutter button on the camera to start shooting and away we go just as simple as that so you need to keep the mobile device very close to the mechanism here when you're using the time lapse trigger it's a little bit different to everything else when I'm using the sliders and the pans and ponds pan tilt head I can walk away I can turn the phone off it still works but with the time lapse trigger it's relying on the phone to translate the information from the camera back to the slider so I just leave my phone it's I think it's about 10 to 15 meters but I usually keep it just leaning up against the tripod and it all works perfectly it's never disconnected once when I've been using it what I would like to do right now is to show you a collection of time lapses I have shot with this micro three slider so I hope you enjoy these foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] foreign [Applause] [Music] well I hope you enjoyed those but you know what I take this slider everywhere I go these days because I absolutely love it it is solid it's pretty heavy but you know I don't mind a bit of weight because it indicates good build quality I've had no troubles with the app it connects all the time doesn't matter where I am and no you don't need phone service for the app to work in fact I use an old phone that doesn't have any Mobile phone coverage at all doesn't even have a SIM card in it so it works fantastically and all of the devices that the the carry case everything else it's just so easy to carry around so I've always got this baby with me and I love everything about it so far it's never let me down and it's working I'm doing more and more time lapses all the time so there you go that's a bit of a rundown for how I use this system for my nightscape Astro time lapse if you want to ask me any more questions I can go into whatever detail you would like down below in the comment section anyway thanks so much for watching I always appreciate that and I'll see you guys in the next video [Music] [Music] thank you thank you [Music]

Channel: Nightscape Images

Views: 14,166

Keywords: nightscape images, nightscape photography, milky way timelapse tutorial, milky way photography, astro timelapse tutorial, astro timelapse settings, astrophotography, light painting photography, light painting, richard tatti nightscape images, richard tatti photography, Richard Tatti, night photography settings, night photography tips and tricks, zeapon pons, Zeapon Pons Milky way, zeapon time lapse, Zeapon Micro3, Zeapon Micro3 E1000

Id: R3cCvWfpbJ8

Length: 26min 53sec (1613 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 14 2022