“House of Cards” Cinematographer needs lots of power to create his time lapses

    You may not know his name, but you’ve likely seen his work. Drew Geraci is the motion time lapse videographer behind the iconic opening to hit Netflix series, “House of Cards.”

    In working on “House of Cards,” Geraci had the opportunity to create a high-resolution motion time lapse sequence for director David Fincher and Netflix. Geraci describes the project as “something that had honestly never been done before.” When you’re pushing the boundaries of motion time lapse video, it’s no surprise that you’d rely on powerful technology to support your vision.

     Why did Geraci start shooting time lapse video?

    Geraci started shooting motion control time lapse seven years ago back in 2012. He was fresh out of the Navy and wanted to create something “more cinematic and more exciting” than “just your still camera sitting on a tripod.” He decided to shoot time lapses.

    Geraci says he is passionate about time lapse because it gives his audience a different perspective from the norm. “We see everything happening in real time, and it’s not until we actually slow it down and compile it and compress it that we actually see what’s going on in the day to day life,” says Geraci. It’s those subtle changes in light and movement that happens over the course of a day condensed down into a few seconds that intrigue Geraci and keep him shooting time lapses.

    Most recently, Geraci worked on a time lapse project at the Kennedy Center. It’s amazing to him to be able to shoot a time lapse of the center and to see all the change in light and scenery.

    How does Geraci do it?

    After capturing hundreds of images with resolutions up to 8K for a time lapse, Geraci takes those images into Adobe Lightroom. He does all the color manipulation there and then exports the files to After Effects. From there, he takes all the sequences together and combines those single images into a video sequence. That video sequence is the finished time lapse.

    Big files require a ton of processing power

    Time lapse files sizes are no joke. They are huge files that require a lot of processing and render time. “You need a lot of horsepower to do that,” says Geraci. When it comes to the workstation Geraci uses for his time lapse post-production work, he needs one that’s fast enough and powerful enough to handle his workflow. That means fast processors, fast GPUs and fast SSDs. 

    Unfortunately, Geraci has had to work with a lot of slow systems in the past. They’ve ended up hurting his workflow efficiency and speed, ultimately losing him money. However, when he switched over to the Dell Precision Workstation, he was able to increase his work speeds by two to three times. The system has saved him a ton of time and allowed him to focus on the creative side of his work.

    The Dell Precision Workstation with the NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000 has really helped increase the performance when rendering his time lapse sequences. Important processes like deflickering and denoising are quite demanding on the GPU, so you need a card that can keep up. That’s especially true with 8K. But Geraci’s had no problems with the RTX 6000. He says it was able to do its job and offer one-to-one playback without any issues.

    The Dell Precision Workstation with NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000 is “not only reliable,” says Geraci, “It gives you the processing power that you need and can really help save time and money in the process.”

    This article was sponsored by Dell and NVIDIA.

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