I’ve been fascinated by time-lapse photography since the days when the Wonderful World of Disney was the only color television show and they had those great nature films. You can see the time-lapse film I’ve made over the last few weeks here http://www.sergneri.net/weather_data/index.php. I included some of the older time-lapse I’ve made over the years just for fun.
For a time, I used a Nikon CoolPix, which was a favorite of mine. However, this camera did not have a time-lapse function. So, I built a little gizmo from a BBQ rotisserie motor, a cam, an iron bar bent into a U shape. The camera was mounted on the bar which arched over the shutter release, positioning the cam attached the motor. It took 1 frame every 10 seconds and worked pretty well.
The Nikon D200 which replaced it has a rather complicated timer program, the basic settings work well. On this camera, I normally shoot 1 frame per 10 seconds but no motor is needed. The photo quality setting, if I remember, I normally bump down from FINE to BASIC to increase the compression and reduce the image size.
Now, I’m also using a SONY Handy-CAM, but I’m shooting with stills, 1 frame per minute. All of the time-lapse you see under the weather series is shot with this camera, the jpg files are downloaded in the evening, sucked into Quicktime PRO at 10 or 12 frames per second, saved as a movie. I then use the old ON2FLIX package to transform the movie into FLASH swf. This is then uploaded to the website. It is now a cookie-cutter operations, copy the jpg, generate movie, transform, code html and upload, all takes about 15 minutes max, the longest time is waiting for Quicktime to load the initial file sequence.
All the stills are filling up one of my Buffalo terabyte drives, but I’ll hang on to them until I have to start rotating through, deleting oldest to make room for newest. I Each day’s filming takes about 700 to 800 megabytes using the SONY, I’m only using about 12 gig as of today.
sergneri
Re: Time-lapse
Post by sergneri ยป Mon Dec 13, 2010 9:43 pm
I have been experimenting with some other software to read and render the still frames, but the rest of the setup remains the same.
First, I tried to use Virtual Dub AVI software with a bob doubler as well as a resize filter. This was much faster than QTIME PRO and produced as good a movie, but it was in AVI so a bit larger. However, I was looking for something that would smooth out the slow frame rate caused by shooting 1 frame per minute with the Sony.
I have been using Sony Vegas Studio for a number of years and so decided to try to use it to pull in the stills and render them out to AVI. I didn’t have much luck with version 8 and upgraded to version 10 HD. This seems to have done the trick. The files from 10DEC2010 on my weather page will demonstrate the difference. I do get slightly larger SWF files but it seems worth it and has not impacted the playback speed too much.
Things progress – soon after I wrote the first comment, I started updating all the swf files to mp4 as swf was going the way of the dodo on the internet. I’ve rebuilt that page a few times to keep it current and correct any flaws.
Nov 27, 2022