12 month Time Lapse

[bjk896]

I want to setup a 12 month (plus or minus) time lapse of a country landscape with new construction activity occurring. I can do the camera - I have choices - I can do the power, the card changes if needed, the intervalometer and the location.
I'm a bit bothered by how long between shots to produce a steady video. At this stage I'd say I'm aiming for a 5 minute finished vid. Do i increase the finished frame rate or keep a "standard" 25fps.

A few thoughts please

[Black Pearl]

Might be worth aiming for 60fps to smoothing things out and if need be allow you to creatively slow things further at key points.

[dje]

I want to setup a 12 month (plus or minus) time lapse of a country landscape with new construction activity occurring. I can do the camera - I have choices - I can do the power, the card changes if needed, the intervalometer and the location.
I'm a bit bothered by how long between shots to produce a steady video. At this stage I'd say I'm aiming for a 5 minute finished vid. Do i increase the finished frame rate or keep a "standard" 25fps.

A few thoughts please

Hi Brian

Presumably the construction scene is not going to change very quickly. If you want the video to be about 5 mins with a frame rate of 25 fps, then according to my sums, you will need to capture a frame about every 35 mins (allowing for 12 hours of sunlight a day on average). The construction situation shouldn't change much over a period of 35 mins however other things such as cloud position probably will.

The other thing to watch is light level. If you capture one frame every 35 mins, you'll capture about 20 frames in a 12 hr period (less than one second of video for each day). If you don't watch how you manage light level changes, you could find the level flickering up and down once a second.

My suggestion would be to set your interval considerably less than 35 mins, say 10 mins. It's quite possible you'll want to edit out some of the footage and also you can either increase the video frame rate and/or have a longer video. Having more frames than you may need is probably a good thing.

If you are doing this over a period of a year, why not review it with a trial video after a couple of weeks.

Dave

[Dave Humphries]

Dave makes some good suggestions, I particularly suggest shooting more than the bare minimum.

As he suggests, you may want to edit out periods of inactivity such as weekends to concentrate on smoother flow during the activity.

I'd suggest you watch several other's attempts to get an idea of things to avoid or include.

e.g. YouTube Search "construction time lapse" Vimeo also have a lot of Time Lapse members.

What is the purpose of making this: Commercial, Hobby, Community?
Should it have a nice bit of music?
Tracking shots?
Different viewpoints?

I'd recommend no less than 1080 resolution.
Don't forget to clean the lens occasionally.

Good luck with the project, Dave

[bjk896]

Thanks guys - That all makes good sense particularly the time planning which will be most essential
I cant reveal (yet) the purpose but its conservation Community based and it will go into post production with some music already chosen about the theme which is unusual.
Dave - tracking/panning isn't an option because of geography and relative heights of landscape but I have been successful some time ago of traversing a finished still to give the illusion of zoom and pan and may be able to do likewise here . Its that long ago I forget the software I used but it does give a very good illusion. Thanks for rekindling the idea
Light will be interesting and I take on board the risks and impressions but it is in low rainfall, country Australia with big skies.
A long way to go before we start

Brian

[bjk896]

Time has moved on - Considerably !!
The short story is i put a camera with a mechanical device - dont ask - to trigger the shutter mechanically because the finepix was a gift, - a story in itself - and placed it at various locations in a wooden box about 7-8 meters up around the 500Ha site.
The project has been ongoing for 6 months, the batteries and solar charging work fine and locations have been changed to reflect the project progress and geographical changes. The 50,000 stills I have are being looked at as we speak and I think we are going to be delighted with the outcome.
The short story is 30 second intervals and preventing the camera from shooting at night because it had to be ON 24/7 and keeping power to the many location setups
I'd like to post some stuff when completed in 12 months or so but , hell, what a journey

[dje]

Time has moved on - Considerably !!
The short story is i put a camera with a mechanical device - dont ask - to trigger the shutter mechanically because the finepix was a gift, - a story in itself - and placed it at various locations in a wooden box about 7-8 meters up around the 500Ha site.
The project has been ongoing for 6 months, the batteries and solar charging work fine and locations have been changed to reflect the project progress and geographical changes. The 50,000 stills I have are being looked at as we speak and I think we are going to be delighted with the outcome.
The short story is 30 second intervals and preventing the camera from shooting at night because it had to be ON 24/7 and keeping power to the many location setups
I'd like to post some stuff when completed in 12 months or so but , hell, what a journey

Thanks for the update Brian. I'm glad to hear things are progressing satisfactorily. Incidentally i came across some software some time ago which might be of interest. It's called LRTimelapse and can be evaluated with a trial version. It is designed to process lots of stills into a video. You can also use Photoshop for this purpose however LTimelapse is specifically designed for this sort of thing and has some handy features (most of which I've forgotten!).

Dave

[bjk896]

Yes Dave I actually bought LRTimelapse - which is almost against my religion - and I'm very happy with it in the limited sense Ive used it
My problem is actually in the editing and coming to a reasonable final result given timeframes, viewer attention spans and lossless quality.

Brian

[Manfred M]

viewer attention spans

This happens when a video is too long. You could always edit it down by increasing the frame rate to speed it up.

and lossless quality.

HD video is a maximum 1920 x 1080 pixels; 4K is 3840×2160. Nicely said, you would be throwing out most of the data that your camera has captured, so stills captured on a DSLR will have to be downsampled considerably. Lossless or lossy compression are not going to have a significant impact on the product your viewers will see.

[dje]

My problem is actually in the editing and coming to a reasonable final result given timeframes, viewer attention spans and lossless quality.

Brian

Brian I'm not quite sure what you mean by lossless quality but if you are aiming for video without compression, then you are chasing an unrealistic and un-necessary goal. Video codecs such as h.264 (AVC- Advanced video codec) give perfectly acceptable quality for what you are doing and have manageable file sizes. Videos compressed in this way would usually be contained in .mov or .m2ts containers.

Dave