Thanks, Paul. I imported all the images into AEFX as a sequence at 24fps. The initial speed was much too fast for my taste, so I slowed it down quite a lot. I imagine that's why it looks a bit rough, especially as I didn't use the frame-blending or motion blur settings either.
There's several things I need to fix on it, including the original images to import. I resized them all from fullsize JPGs to 1080's before importing, and even at this point the images look nowhere near as amazing as the untouched originals. I need to nab a free weekend and really hammer out a proper workflow as I'd like to do a lot of these. I think I've been reading too much stuff by member Phil Arntz lol.
Thanks, Ernest. Interval was 30-seconds. That was a common number that I could set both the exposure & intervalometer to, so that it would snap a new pic immediately at an exposure I liked. All the images were shot as JPGs instead of RAW, for a few reasons.
1) I was pretty sure the memory card would fill up before the battery died, if taking RAWS. (This would have been the case, I learned)
2) The week before, I'd been out with a buddy who'd been doing timelapse on his 5D. He was taking 60-sec exposures, and that resulted in an incredibly long write-time after each shot finished. Even though a T2i RAW image is many times smaller than the 5D's, I didn't want to have to worry about calculating that time requirement either.
Doing this again, I would have lit the tree from the beginning. It was simply accident that it ends up looking so incredible later on, when the moon rose.
