Time Lapse?

[Charles Mabry]

Ive already searched but am unable to figure out how to do this. Is there a setting on the camera or is it something I need to do in post editing? We are shooting a small ghost doc just for fun this weekend and would like to set up a time lapse camera. We are using the z1u's but can also use pd170 if anyone knows how to do the time lapse on those.

Once again thanks for the help!

Mabry

[Matt Davis]

Originally Posted by Charles Mabry

Is there a setting on the camera or is it something I need to do in post editing?

There is a 'sort of' mode, but I never used it because it doesn't do just one frame at a time. There's two common methods:

1) Shoot in real time and speed it up in post

2) Connect the camera to a computer and capture frames via firewire

The first method limits you to an hour of unattended shooting, and requires real-time capture. Fine for something that's over and done in 5-20 minutes, but not really much use for proper timelapse stuff. But it works, and it's fine for ad-hoc stuff.

The second method is far more flexible. As a Mac user, I'd recommend Boinx iStopMotion

Boinx Software - iStopMotion 2 - Pro

I'm sure there's an equivalent PC application out there.

Of course, this assumes you have a spare PC, a power supply and somewhere safe to put it all.

On the other hand, some cameras have built-in intervalometers. My old Pentax Optio 750 could take up to 99 images, which I'd make into a high definition movie and move it around in the editing package.

Doing timelapse on tape is mechanically tricky and potentially damaging to the tape heads, plus it would eat up battery power.

[Greg Laves]

My best results with time lapse were done by shooting 1 hour of regular video and then speeding it up in PP CS3.

[Charles Mabry]

Thanks guys.... we dont use mac, thanks to mil contracts we are stuck with pc. I will try some stuff out and see what I can come up with.

Once again... thanks for the help.