I'm planning on taping some standard time lapse footage (weather, traffic, SF bay, etc.) but I can't help but wonder what kind of stress this will put on the XL1s. Does anyone have an opinion (informed or otherwise) about the wear-and-tear time lapse inflicts upon the motor/transport/tape? Avoiding having to tape at regular speed and then time compressing it after transferring would be nice but not at the price of compromising my camera.

Bruce,
(A semi-informed opinion as a fellow XL1s owner and very occasional time-lapse shooter.) I doubt that this feature places much additional stress on the camera beyond normal use over the same period of time. The tape transport moves the tape by very tiny amounts when recording.

I do, however, suspect that it places some additional mechanical demands on the tape itself. For high reliability I believe that the magnetic layer and carrier material need to be particularly stable and durable because the tape will need to remain threaded for a long time. I would use the highest grade tape (in your preferred brand) you can possibly get.

Do be sure to either power the camera from a/c or use high-cap (BP-945 class) batteries (even better, use two mounted in the CH-910). Remember, the camera will draw power over the whole time-lapse period.

Bruce...

You might want to see if you can connect it to a laptop and grab frames through Premiere or some other portable NLE.

What about using a Firestore? It can also be set up as an intervalometer to grab individual frames.

The XL1 grabs groups of frames instead of individual frames so the end result is not exactly like you'd find with a frame-by-frame time lapse.

Dean Sensui
Base Two Productions

<<<-- Originally posted by Dean Sensui : Bruce...

The XL1 grabs groups of frames instead of individual frames so the end result is not exactly like you'd find with a frame-by-frame time lapse.
-->>>

This is what bugs me the most about the interval recording.

I recently used the interval recording for a project, and had the same questions. The bottom line is that the camera is still performing fine. One piece of good advice I received is make sure the cameris set to manual otherwise you will get some weird results if it changes setting (focus etc) between intervals. Especially if there is a risk of something passing in front of the camera.

After grabbing about six hours of real time using the interval timer, I was originally disappointed by the results as they were still very jerky, however I managed to speed up the end result in post and capture it again so that the final result had a real "time lapse" feel to it and lasted about 60 secs.

Good luck with the project.

Best Regards

Steve G

Bruce,
if you have a mac, check out this software solution, Stop Motion Studio, read more about it on this thread:
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?s=&threadid=7408