Time Lapse

I've watched several time-lapse presentations on TV.

What exactly can one do with a digital camera?

I have two Nikon cameras each of which can take up to 999 photos at any interval I choose.

So, to put these photos together I need a GIF program?

If this works, or something similar works, what would be the suggested intervals for exposure, say for clouds moving over a mountain and what, if any, are the suggested sizes and format.

I presume small .jpeg's would work for rapid transition.

Anyone tried this?

Larry

Larry - I have taken a few shots at moving clouds. Nothing serious - just near the house to play around with it. The duration and number of images to some extent depends on what you want to show, and over what period of time. I took my shots at 1 minute intervals, over a couple of hours. That gave me 120 shots that I set to show for 1 second each. If you wanted to show something that happened a lot faster you might take more shots. And you might need to keep your final display time in mind too - they're all inter-related depending on what you want. (If you're particularly interested in clouds, the speed they're moving and how much of the day you want to show factor in as well.)

As far as software, I've only used the basic movie making software that came with Photoshop Elements (it outputs a wmv) or the animation options in PS CS4 to produce an animated GIF. Either file output can get quite large - I prefer the movie format because of the playback options.

Larry, I discovered the other day that Photoshop CS4 Extended will convert a series of jpegs into a movie with a number of common video formats to choose from. One way to work out intervals is to decide how long you want the video to run (say 20 secs), what frame rate you want to use (say 25 frames per second for smooth looking video) and the period you want to record (say 50 minutes of cloud movement). So, 25 frames/sec by 20 seconds = 500 frames. Over 50 minutes, that is one frame every 1/10th of a minute, or 6 seconds.

I would not suggest the animated gif format, as a gif file can only render 256 colors, and the quality of your photos will drop significantly.

I'm not using Photoshop. Guess eventually I'll have to separate with more cash for CS4.

Just updated to a new computer. Goodness, photography gets expensive fast!!!

I was working, rather "waiting", with 1/2 gig RAM.

Now I've got 6 gig of RAM and an intel-quad-core, 2.7. Much faster to no one's surpise.

I only have a GIF animator at this time with an old program call PhotoImpact. Sounds like it would be a waste.

Question: Once a file is made and put on a DVD, will a television render the product with the fast speeds necessary for smooth appearance? Or will that occur only on a computer? If the latter, kind of defeats the purpose.

Thanks for the replies so far. Just became a paid member after monitoring and commenting for over a year and will be posting a few photos for critique.

Larry

Larry - I burned a slide show (not time lapse - just a big group of pics) to a CD in a format playable in my DVD player. It played it just fine, as I think any software that creates movie formats will....remember, if you put it in a movie format, I think you're going to get a movie frame rate (essentially) no matter how many images are involved. If you want it to show 3000 images in one second, it can't do that. You'll get your usual 30 frames per second, or 1 of every 100 of your images.

If you don't want to pay the money for it you may want to try out this freeware software to turn jpegs into an avi movie. I haven't tried it myself but its free so I don't see why not try it.

http://home.hccnet.nl/s.vd.palen/

I don't think it will do HD though.

Actually disregard that last one, it looks like windows movie maker which comes with windows can do it. Check out this tutorial:

http://www.haworth-village.org.uk/nature/time-lapse/tutorial/making-time-lapse.asp

and if you have not yet checked out tom @ timescapes videos on vimeo and are looking for some inspiration check out this:

http://www.vimeo.com/timescapes

Most cameras (the canon's do) have cameras that you can hook up to your laptop and via software, allocate settings such as how many milli-seconds you want each photo to be, and it'll store it on your PC which is great as it doesn't compress the computer in any form - and this is advanturous if you have a full Full Frame camera. However if you go into Adobe After Effects or Premiere (any movie making software) and if you render these shows out as uncompressed, you might be looking at 2-3 Gigs for only 3-4 frames. I was amazed at this :) But you would only use this IF doing movies/shows to be projected in cinemas or in HD.

------------------------------------------------
Vegetable Garden + Home Garden = My Garden
WLB