how do you time lapse with a video camera?

Question

i have a panasonic video camera and i need to know how to time lapse and pronto! 10 points for grabs!

Answer 1

Okay here's a tutorial on how to create a time lapse video using just about any digital camera, Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe Premiere. I use a Nikon D2H because it has a built-in interval timer which keeps me from having to do the shooting by hand. I taught myself all this so bear with me if something could be done better somehow I haven't discovered yet. I'm assuming you have a pretty good knowledge of Photshop and a basic knowledge of premiere. just email me if something doesn't make sense for you. [e-mail]

First think you need to do is shoot the images, but before you do that make sure your CCD is as clean as you possibly can make it, cloning dust off of the hundreds or thousands of images in photoshop will be a pain in the you know what.

Set your camera up so that it's shooting pretty small images (Standard television is somewhear near 640x480 pixels) and and shoot as jpegs on about medium quality. You'll end up shooting hundreds or thousands of frames so not only will you need a lot of memory, but it will also put quite a bit of abuse on your shutter.

A great way to practice is to just use clouds, they're almost always around and always moving.

It depends on what I'm shooting when I decide at what interval to shoot the frames but it's usually 1-5 seconds. Most video is shot at around 30 frames per second so keep that in mind when deciding what you want your interval to be. If you do 1 frame per second your final video will have about 1 minute of real time go by every second in the movie. If you do 1 frame every 10 seconds you'll have 10 minutes go by every second. If your using a wide angle lens to shoot the whole sky use about 3-5 seconds per frame and if your using a long lens to shoot the detail of a cloud (great around sunset) use about 1-2 seconds per frame.

Make sure the camera is on a very sturdy tripod and once you get it set up and your movie composed take a good look around to make sure nothing is going to bump the camera. Keep rain in mind too, you dont want to have a good storm sequence ruined by water drops on the lens. If your camera does not have an interval timer you will have to have a cable release, a timer or watch, and a lot of patience.

Once your sure everything is ready (did you remember extra batteries and memory?) start shooting. If your doing this by hand don't worry about being perfect. If you mess up once in a while it wont matter and, better yet, if you see some lightning between frames and want to try to get it in there, go for it. The frames will be going by so quickly that you will never notice the occasional frame being too soon or too late. The same goes for when you need to change batteries. If you need to change cards, keep good track of what order the cards go in. Do not adjust the exposure but if you HAVE to, do it very gradually. Shoot in complete manual mode

Once your done with the shoot, download the photos onto your computer and keep them in folders based on what card it is (Card 1, Card 2...etc.). You'll want to have a back-up too, in case something goes wrong.

One good thing about doing this for the web (as opposed for TV) is that you can set it up to be any aspect ratio you want. Vertical, Horizontal, vertical-panoramic... Open Photoshop and then open the first image in the sequence. Create an action called time lapse and set it to rotate (if needed), crop (to 550x340 ratio), and resize to 550x340 pixels. Once you have the action created close the photo (don't save) and run the action on all of the frames in all of the folders you shot. This will take awhile.

Once that is finished you should have hundreds of small jpegs that are all 550x340 pixels, maybe in several folders. Now open Adobe Premiere.

It will ask you to create a new project, click custom, then change the editing mode to Quicktime. Click the drop down menu (where it says General) and go to video. In the video options click Motion Jpeg A as the compressor and a frame rate of 30 (you can change this if you like for varying results). Make sure it is set to 550x340 pixels. Set the quality to about 75%. Click OK. (these can be changed later)

You should see three windows: Monitor, Project and Timeline.

First thing you do is go to Edit> Preferences> General and Still Image. At the bottom set the default duration to 1 frame and push OK.

Go to File>Import>Folder and select the first folder of images. Repeat for however many folders you have. You should see the folders in the "Bin", which is in the ptoject window. To add them to the movie, just drag the folder to the Video 1 bar in the Timeline window. The progam will automatically fill the individual frames into the timeline. Repeat as necessary.

You can also add audio the same way.

Preview your video in the monitor and if you like it let's export it.

Click on File>Export Timeline>Movie. Name the file and click Settings. Make sure that Quick Time is selected as the file type and then go to the Video settings and make sure the aspect ratio and frame rate are correct. Under compression, use 75 but be prepared to re-export at different settings to get the file size you desire.

Click OK, then Save and when it's done rendering, see how it looks.

The following is a video I made of fireworks. I didn't like the interval I shot at (5 seconds) so I changed the frame rate in Premiere to 12 instead of 30 which made it a little choppier than I wanted but it legnthened the video. The uncompressed file is just over 50 MB and this file is compressed to about 10 MB.


http://www.noahbryant.com/citygoldenmd.htm


If anyone who has better knowledge of premiere can offer tips please feel free. I taught myself how to do this so I'm sure there are some things I could be doing better.

You dont HAVE to use quicktime as your format either. Experiment with the program and come up with settings you like.

Have fun!

Answer 2

First of all, your camera should have the option for Video Interval recording, if it has, set it to -3-4 minutes of intervals. then once you're done with the whole shoot, you would have to edit the video, I use Adobe premiere pro. There's no other way to do it, it's not a point and shoot project. :) Check on your batteries too.

NOTE: If you are trying to capture something that takes a long time to occur and in which not much happens quickly you will want to set the interval at around a minute and the record time as short as possible on your camera. An example would be if you wanted to record a day in the life of a flower or the clouds rolling by in the sky. Suppose however that you want to capture an event that has lots of action and occurs over a much shorter time frame. Then you would want to shorten the interval between recordings and increase the time of each recording. So in this case you might record every 15-30 seconds and record up to 2-3 seconds of video each time.

Answer 3

Time lapse demands an exterior distant set off which you will set to each 5 or so seconds. First you will desire to have a digital camera that accepts a distant. The Canon t3i is solid for that i've got self belief, at approximately $600. That value would not comprise the distant even however.

Answer 4

Your model of camera may indeed have a setting as decribed in the previous answer, if not a stills button usually will take a few frames of footage, or pressing the record button on off will give you six seconds of footage or so. Depending on how you are editing (unless you need the effect in camera) it should be easy enough to chop out excess secs of footage. My best suggestion, would be to use a digital stills camera (take 24-26 pictures for each second of action, for normal speed, more for slower, less for faster) then you can, import them to a movie editing programme, play them back on a slideshow on a fast setting, scroll through them in preview, or even print them out and make a flick book, to view the results.
Good luck.