How to film a time lapse?

Well as you can imagine, you can't just point the camera at something and make it speed up, so you can either film something until the tape runs out, then speed it up to your liking in your editing program, or record in intervals, say record for 1 second pause for 5 or different depending on what it is. Or if you have a really nice video camera there is probably a time lapse setting that does all the intervals for you.

Also you can just use a still camera and take single shots in intervals, then combine them in a video editing program. It's time consuming but I find it can make for some sick shit.

And a tripod is pretty clutch for any of that.
 
you cant film it without a tripod. but yea this guy^ knows it.just record for a long time, then load it in premiere or something then speed it up till it looks good
 
can't you just film it by putting the camera on a ledge or something so long as its still? how long do you short for like 10 seconds of footage
 
put the camera on a level surface, preferably a tripod, and just film for a long time and speed it up when you edit it
 
if the timelapse is under an hour, shoot non-interval recording on a tripod without moving it with a shutter speed of 1/8 and speed it up approx. 900% in post, yo.
 
about 15 minutes...depending on what you want. if your doing clouds...then about 30 minutes. if your doing a city shot 15 minutes should be good
 
the amount of times the shutter opens and closes in 1 second, so 1/8 shutter speed would me the shutter of the camera opens and closes 8 times in 1 second, thus giving it a motion blur effect. So filming a time lapse with a low shutter like that makes it look like, say, the streaks of traffic in TBC.

if you have a lower end camera then I don't know if you can change shutter to that slow. Most of them go from 1/60 (normal) to 1/2000.

And I shot a time lapse in the air port and I filmed for about 8 minutes with a shutter at 1/8 and when sped up to 900% I got the right speed I wanted, and the clip was like 15 seconds long. For cloud shots obviously you need to speed up a much higher percentage than 900%, it really depends on the shot.
 
i used to agree that the camera had to be level at all times but my friend was shooting one and he hadn't tightened the screws all the way so the camera's weight slowly brought the tripod down over the course of an hour. because it was really slow it looked really cool...but yes, unless you can do this fluke intentionally it is normally necessary to have a tripod or a ledge of some sort
 
does it need to be like a blue sky day with only a few clounds, or will it still be cool on like an overcast day? does the camera need to really nice in order to film the invdividual clouds clearly?
 
well if its an overcast where the sky has no texture, just grey, then you won't get anywhere with the sky unless it clears up during the time lapse. Everything else will move around though.
 
a good timelapse takes 9-12 minutes to film, if you are filming the sun or moon or anything like that itll take much longer like 30 minutes
 
^cause if a rain drop or something hits the lens then you speed it up, theres nothing jiggling in the shot. yucko.
 
1. Take a digi Slr and put it on a tripod

2. expose the shot correctly so that you have a 1/2 second shutter speed.

3. take a pic every other second

4. take about 2000-3000 shots

5. smack it in final cut and voila.

that's how they do the teddybear timelapses
 
Don't they just use a 16mm film camera shooting single frames? Seems that would be easier. I've done a bunch of timelapses with a DSLR and they are a pain in the ass.
 
I believe they used 32mm and thats why they were able to zoom in on them digitally without it being all pixelated
 
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