Thursday, February 18, 2010

Timelapse video experiments

I started this blog for a number of reasons, one of which was to encourage myself to experiment and try new things.  I have always been curious about lapse videos.  I really have no excuse for not trying to make one earlier.  My cameras are equipped with an intravalometer  which is the necessary bit of camera equipment to make them.
 



 I knew how to setup the camera, but I didn't know what to do with the frames once I captured them.  A bit of googling led me to this page.   This was all I really needed.  However, there are tons of more complete resources out there to help also.  Here is a good overview.

I set my camera up to make a frame every 3 seconds.  I let it make 150 frames or so.  I had my camera set to create small JPEGS at basic settings.  Even dropping down to the small setting creates frames with more resolution greater than HD video.  I used the gimp to resize the frames to 720P resolution.  I let it change the aspect ratio on one video, and let it pad the video in the other.  I'm not sure which way I like better.  In the future I should probably compose with the aspect ratio in mind, and crop it down in post.  I created the videos with the following command:

>ffmpeg.exe -r5 -i DSC_%4d.jpg -an -vcodec copy drip.avi

It makes the video at 5 frames per second, making it about 30 seconds in length.  I didn't add any audio.  I like seeing how the shadows and trees move about in the videos.



Feel free to watch the videos, but remember these are the efforts of a beginner testing the water.  You will never get that time back.  You have been warned.

(Note: If you are viewing this in Reader or Buzz, the embedded objects don't seem to show up)

3 comments:

JonOfTrout said...

How about a time lapse video of the toilet paper?

Ken said...

What should the toilet paper be doing?

Solfrost said...

You should be using your legs more!