Anyone tried time lapse?

TripleBlack · 08-09-2012, 12:17am

I've been fascinated by time lapse stuff I've seen on the web and wanted to give it a try. I don't have an intevalometer but found out the Canon software has one built in so you can just connect a laptop to your camera via USB.

The shot below has about 450 frames and is rendered at 24 FPS so it's just under 20 seconds. I shot 1 frame every 15 seconds so you can do the math to find out how long it took.

I shot these in RAW so I could easily adjust the color balance in Lightroom but you could also do JPG. After importing, just edit one frame including a 16:9 crop, select all the frames and sync. It took Lightroom quite a while to finish the sync and a good while to export to jpgs as well. Didn't time but > 30 minutes on my PC.

The next step is to assemble the frames into a video. Being a cheap person, I downloaded Virtual Dub which does this easily. There are tutorials on the web explaining how to set the frame rate, compression, etc. It can render the video in less than 3 minutes.

I added some royalty free music just to see if I could. Virtual Dub handles that easily as well; just feed it an MP3 clipped to same length as the video.

Subject is nothing special... just tonight's sunset taken off the back patio. Excuse the distracting pool sweep. Should have taken it out of the pool.

It's full HD so check it out full screen.