Time Lapse on a 8gb card?

[Ty Chu]

Hi there:

I need to record a Christmas Tree being decorated for four days 16 hours a day.
What is the best interval to use given that I only have one 8gb card.
1m 5m 10m at one shot time 1f.

at the 10m interval I would get 96 frames of time lapse a day- times four days which would would give me 6.4 minutes of time lapse. would this look ok or am I missing something?

Any input would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance...

[Tom Klein]

Try a test run, I worked with a crew a while ago and we did a time lapse of people arriving and sitting down at an outside opera concert, their calculations of 1sec every 10sec was not right, I wanted to set at 3frames every 10sec.
their calculation was too slow making the sequence too long for broadcast use.
Do your test over say 1 hr and calculate that over your total hrs, your end requirement should dictate your start points.
Cheers

[Ty Chu]

Thanks Tom for the heads up, I guess there is no definitive answer. I will run an hour test run.

Best,

Ty lucky7sound.com

[Tom Klein]

Hi,

"definitive answer", well i suppose that is what works for you..
goodluck

Tom K

[Ty Chu]

I saw a post in the past from someone that had the breakdown on how much memory would be used for each selection 1f every 1 sec 5 sec and so on.

I was wondering if anyone knows of that link?

Best,

Ty lucky7sound.com

[Bo Skelmose]

You could always speed it up if you have to many pictures recorded - you cannot slow it - if you recorded less than needed.

[Barry Green]

Originally Posted by Ty Chu

at the 10m interval I would get 96 frames of time lapse a day- times four days which would would give me 6.4 minutes of time lapse. would this look ok or am I missing something?

That math is way off. 96 frames of time lapse would go by in about three seconds (assuming 30fps time base) or 1.5 seconds (assuming 720/60p). So four days of that, you'd end up with a grand total of 6.4 seconds, not 6.4 minutes!

As far as how much your card can store -- 8 gigabytes yields about 8 minutes of 720/60p. So the total # of frames you can store will be roughly 28,800 frames.

Over the course of four days, you'll 96 hours. That means that the absolute fastest frame rate you could use, and still make it for all four days, would be about 12 seconds per frame. So if you set it to 1 frame every 10 seconds, it'd almost get through the entire four days; if you set it to 1 frame every 30 seconds, it'd definitely get through.

Then the question you have to ask is: how fast do you want this time lapse to play out? Do you really want it to take 8 minutes? If you only want it to take 1 minute, you'd have to use a frame rate 8x slower, or probably (rounding off) the 1 frame every 5 minutes option. Of course, you could always just use the longer amount of time and then speed up the footage in post, too.