Time Lapse Question.

[LoathesRaisins]

I'm building my dad's old 1970's Kawasaki Samurai for my senior project and I want to make a time lapse of it coming together. Would my laptops time lapse feature work for this or would it be better to just use a digital camera and take a picture every 10 minutes or so. What would be the best time interval to take pictures? Any other suggestions? I'm not to keen on photography and stuff like this.

 

[LoathesRaisins]

To the top.

 

[Mag]

Take a photo as often as you can(obviously to an extent). What do you mean by your laptops time lapse?

 

[UBC_Freeride]

I disagree.

Its pretty simple math to figure out how frequently you need to take a picture to get a time lapse of a desired duration, if you know a few things about your scenario.

For example, if your project is going to take 2 hours and you want your time lapse to last 10 seconds, and you know you have a sequence with 30 frames per second:

30 frames/second * 10 seconds = 300 frames needed

300frames needed * X seconds/ 1picture(or "frame") = 2 hours *3600sec/hour

So you'd want to take a picture every X seconds, where X = 7200 / 300 seconds = 24 seconds

Nah'm saying?

That being said you can always just take a shit load of pictures and speed up your timelapse afterwards haha

 

[Mag]

No, take more photos, only use the ones you want. You WILL regret not taking enough.

 

[LoathesRaisins]

Well, the webcam on it has a time lapse option on it.

 

[Mag]

Don't use a webcam, just take photos on your camera.

 

[AnanasXpress]

I know this is an obvious one, but keep the camera on a tripod, or in the exact same position for the whole duration.

 

[gravel]

Use an actual camera, and take pictures I'd say once every 10ish seconds.

As for time lapses in general, I'll always contend that taking a TON of pictures and figuring out the speed in post is a lot better than taking "x" amount of pictures and wishing you could slow it down more. Usually when I do timelapses I take pictures every 2 or 4 seconds for anywhere from one to three hours, so I'll have times when I get 1000+ pictures that go into one timelapse which is well over a minute long, but then I can be picky about what part I want to show, if I want to ramp it, etc. You can always speed stuff up and keep quality but you can't slow stuff down the same way.