Interval Shooting for Time Lapse
 

I was curious if you could use the DVX100's interval shooting feature (what Panasonic calls intermittent recording) to do true Time Lapse.

Here's my idea:

Set the record time, say to 0.5 seconds
Set the interval time to whatever you want to time lapse at.

The camera takes a 0.5 second (or 15 frame) shot every interval. The problem is that you have a half second of continuous motion for every shot. Not very "time-lapsey".

But, if you could take one frame from each shot and complile those frames, then it would be true time lapse. So, if that's the case, couldn't you just take an NLE and slow it down so that it grabs one frame from each shot?

So, in the above example, you have 2 shots every 30 frames (1 second), or 2 shots per second. So, to get time lapse, you would simply run it at 1/15th the speed.

I haven't tried this yet, but was curious if anyone had any thoughts on this.

Russell

P.S. If anyone would like to see my 24p test, you can check it out here: http://toppup.com/oei/caleb.wmv (2.5M)

Have you tried this yet? Does it work? I thought most NLEs would probably try to interpolate that one frame rather than just discard n out of every n+1 frames, but haven't actually tried it.


Interesting, Windows Media Player reports this .wmv file as running at 29fps. Have you tried converting back to 24 and then compressing (Windows Media 9 is much improved over 7 BTW)

Amazingly, I got this time lapse thing to work this evening. I setup my DVX100 for interval recording (0.5s time at 30s intervals). I let it run for about 6 or 7 hours. I shot it outside, and what a great test, because you'll see that the day starts off beautiful and cloudless. But, as typical with Texas, a storm blew in, so you actually get to see this drastic change in the weather just before sunset.

After I shot the footage, I didn't really want to capture all 25 minutes of the footage and then scale down the speed in After Effects (which can be done without interpolation provided you leave Frame Blending unchecked). So, I found that Premiere has a Stop Motion feature that allows you to capture in Time Lapse mode. Premiere's Time Lapse setting allows you to capture x amount of frames per minute, per hour or per day. I set it to capture 120 frames per minute based on my settings. (2 shots per second equals 120 shots per minute.) The time lapse came out nice!

Here's the clip: http://toppup.com/timelapse.wmv (3M)
Or Quicktime: http://toppup.com/timelapse.mov (5M)

I would like to hear your thoughts.
Russell
toppup.com

That does look great. I don't have Premiere though. I wonder how you'd manage it with FCP3? I do have AE5.5, but I thought AE does reinterpret/recompress when you scale time and duration. Is this wrong?

Skip Hunt

I was able to do the same Time Lapse adjustment in both FCP and AE. I captured the raw (interval-based) footage. Then, in both FCP and AE, I simply changed the speed to 1/15th the speed. (The two programs hanlde this oppositely--200% in AE means you double the speed where 200% in FCP means you half the speed.) Also, I turned on frame blending for both, and going through it frame by frame, there is an ever so slight improvement on the motion of some of the clouds, but it's really inperceptible. I created two more files for you to compare:

http://toppup.com/timeLapseFCP.wmv
http://toppup.com/timeLapseAE.wmv

The running time is different for the two files because I don't think the speed adjustments were very accurate.

Comparing the three attempts (Premiere, FCP and AE), I think the AE version is the smoothest.

Russell

Thanks! I figured that would work but I hadn't tried it myself. Actually, I hadn't expected to look as smooth as it does. Can't wait to try myself.

thx again for sharing your tests!

Skip

im about to do a sunset above the anzac bridge using this feature with Vegas 4...

any thoughts on this app with this feature?

I dont think you can capture in lapsed mode, but adjusting velocity shouldnt be a problem...

thoughts anyone??

In Vegas 4, use the velocity envelope and/or the event rate (Ctrl+edge drag) to speed up the clip the correct amount. These two features layer together, so 4x via rate and 3x via velocity yield 12x together. You can try turning off event resampling from the context menu if you don't want frame blending, but try it with it on too to see what the result looks like.
///d@

thaxx dennis, ill give it a try :)