Step Three:<\/strong><\/p>

Here are the settings I used to get a good looking timelapse of the Philadelphia skyline. I used the amazon basics tripod and set up my Canon T2i (with the kit lens\u2026for now) on the balcony of my apartment.<\/p>

If you\u2019re not familiar with Magic Lantern, you\u2019ll have to click the erase button on your Canon camera body to get to the Magic Lantern settings.<\/p>

Movie Tab:<\/strong><\/p>

This is the most vital step. Enable FPS override and choose your desired FPS. 3FPS will get you about 2 minutes of footage per hour. Obviously you can condense this after you shoot in programs like Adobe After Effects. Under advance settings I used the Low Jello mode to get fluid motion during the day time. If you\u2019re shooting and want the exposure to be constant without flickering, I would also suggest you enable Constant exposure. This can cause issues with day-to-night transitions (as I learned) however so be weary of that and test to see if this feature will help you. At night I would suggest the low-light setting in place of Low Jello.  You can go down to .2 FPS to reduce file usage but you will definitely have to fine tune the shutter with exposure override.<\/p>

Exposure Tab:<\/strong><\/p>

This tab contains the settings which are vital to how your timelapse is going to look in terms of brightness, focus, shutter speeds, and hence light-trails\/motion blue. If you keep Expo. Override OFF, then the camera will use automatic settings like it always does when filming video on a Canon body. If you enable exposure override however, you\u2019re in manual mode IN movie mode. Pretty cool right? Here you can define your ISO, shutter, aperture, and white balance. For a distant skyline, I liked a high aperture so I set it to 14. I had difficulty choosing a manual focus shutter so I left that at default which seemed to work well at about 1\/5. You can customize this to your preference and it\u2019ll reflect in your LiveView.<\/p>

Prefs Tab:<\/strong><\/p>

If you want to shoot for more than an hour than battery life is going to become a concern. Fortunately, the geniuses at Magic Lantern have a setting to turn off the screen even when filming in Movie Mode. This allowed me to shoot for about 2 hours before battery life got pretty low (I wasn\u2019t fully charged btw). I set it to turn off the LCD after 30 secs when on standby and while recording. This is pretty much something you have to set since the LCD kills the battery.<\/p>

Set your MANUAL focus:<\/strong><\/p>

To avoid the auto-focus from going crazy on clouds, cars, whatever you\u2019re going to want your lens in manual focus. I usually set the focus to infinity for distant horizon timelapses but you may choose otherwise. Focus is all up to you on this; it doesn\u2019t affect Magic Lantern\u2019s FPS override feature.<\/p>