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Author Topic: Time Lapse Photography  (Read 1732 times)

Peter McLennan

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Time Lapse Photography
« on: May 10, 2004, 11:35:47 am »

It's possible, but not easy.  It all depends on how "high quality" you desire.  Let's say you want to acquire in HDTV.  That means you need to capture JPG's at at least 1600X1200 and crop/scale them to HDTV aspect ratio and pixel dimensions.  Each frame would be over a megabyte.

Then you need to assemble the JPG's into an animation format, say AVI or Quicktime.  For this you'll need a video editing system of some description and the skills to use it.  Outputting these animations to video (say DVD) would mean further steps of encoding and burning the media.

Smooth timelapse frequently needs frame intervals of about one to ten seconds.  If you want to capture sequences several seconds long, you need to capture and process a lot of frames.

Further, while capturing time lapse, time lapses.  It takes quite a long time to shoot this stuff.  Given the usual productivity ratio of good shots to bad, you can see that it takes quite a while to accumulate, process and output good timelapse.

As I said, doable, but not easy. I must say, however, that it can be quite satisfying to see the end result.  For inspiration, I suggest you rent a DVD of "Baraka".

Good shooting!

Peter
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Bill Ozanne

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Time Lapse Photography
« Reply #1 on: May 10, 2004, 10:39:16 am »

I'm not sure if this is the right forum, but some research has led me to believe that high quality time lapse movies are made from still cameras.

Is this true?  Can I make a high quality time lapse from a Canon 10D?  I am very interested in making high quality landscape time lapse movies and I was always under the impression that I needed a high end camcorder.

Does anybody have any experience with this?  Any tips, links, settings?

Thanks
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