Time lapse

[Hugh Mobley]

I have tried the Interval taping, didn't really like it, and then also taken a clip and sped it up, I have seen this camera being used to get real nice time lapse, I am wondering if anyone can share their method for getting real nice time lapse clips with the V1

[Lee Berger]

I agree. I tried it and the minimum interval of 15 frames was too long. I captured the footage into Final Cut Pro 6 and interestingly enough it created 5 frame clips for each 15 frame interval. Recombined on a timeline they produced a good timelapse. Here is a link to my experiment on Vimeo
Timelapse of Sangre De Christo Mountians in Colorado on Vimeo

[Hugh Mobley]

Thats it, that will work, I tried it on a crowd and ended up just speeding up the normal footage, but what you did is what I'm looking for, thanks

[Greg Laves]

I have been wanting to try to do some time lapse footage. But I just tried speeding it up. I managed to make PP CS3 crash several times trying to figure out how to do it. I had about 30 minutes that I wanted to cut down to about 30 seconds. I chose 5000% speed. The only way Premier Pro would do it was in 5 minute chunks. Anything longer and it would lock up. I was pleased with the results as far as the time lapse but I failed to achieve the look I wanted. I was out before sunrise and I let the camera auto adjust exposure. Doooh. It made the footage a lot less dramatic because there wasn't the contrast of lighting levels I wanted to see.

[Hugh Mobley]

Originally Posted by Lee Berger

I agree. I tried it and the minimum interval of 15 frames was too long. I captured the footage into Final Cut Pro 6 and interestingly enough it created 5 frame clips for each 15 frame interval. Recombined on a timeline they produced a good timelapse. Here is a link to my experiment on Vimeo
Timelapse of Sangre De Christo Mountians in Colorado on Vimeo

what were the camera settings, 1 sec or 2 sec per min, or 5 minutes seems too long,

[Max Volki]

Time lapse

No video camera I know can shoot single frames, like the old movie cameras.

With my former DVCAM-Camera Sony PD 150 I used a little program to capture real single frames. If the camera was on, but not recording, you could see the live picture on the display.
Trough firewire you could transfer the image in real-time to a computer/laptop

The program would now save one frame (bmp) after an odder to your hard-disk, as long as you like and at defined intervals. All you had to do, was the keep the camera and the laptop running

Today, with HDV cameras, the program can’t be used, as it is not further developed

From the V1E you can, through the HDMI out, export the live video uncompressed directly to a fast Raid on a computer, if you use the Blackmagic Intensity-card.
If you had a HDMI PCMCIA adapter to a fast laptop, you could save single frames, if the ZM-program would allow capturing 16:9 HD(V) frames

Dos someone know of another program like ZM and is there a HDMI-PCMCIA-adapter around?

[Lee Berger]

Originally Posted by Hugh Mobley

what were the camera settings, 1 sec or 2 sec per min, or 5 minutes seems too long,

I tried a couple of intervals from the min to max. However I think that the interval, how often it records, doesn't seem to be as important as the duration of each recording which is a minimum of 15 frames on the v1U (both HDV and DV). 15 frames makes sense at least in HDV as that is the GOP structure. As Max notes you cannot shoot a single frame as the duration. However capturing in FCP and enabling the "make new clip on start and stop" function seems to lop off ten frames leaving five. This seems to be a reasonable duration for stop motion or time lapse. If you are using Premiere you might enable that function and see how many frames are actually captured for each interval.

[Seth Bloombaum]

Originally Posted by Max Volki

Dos someone know of another program like ZM and is there a HDMI-PCMCIA-adapter around?

This chart shows some shareware/open source and some commercial products for animation stop-motion recording. Seems like some of these would provide interval recording of an external camera source, but I didn't research it.

HDMI into a laptop - that is the trick, isn't it?

DVRack (firewire only), now included with the Adobe CS3 Production bundle, has a versatile time-lapse recording function for DV and HDV. Unfortunately, it has the same limitation described above; while it will do single-frame recording for DV and DVCPRO, for HDV it must capture a full GOP of 15 frames. The product philosophy so far has been to record strictly what is output from the camera, so it seems unlikely that Adobe will provide on-the-fly transcoding in the CS4 release.

[Eric Mayrand]

I often modify clips speeds in the 200-1000% range in Final Cut and never have had problems. I do usually first remove audio (because it don't want it) and almost always add some pan and/or zoom to add interest. I just verified 5000% speed on a 15 minute HDV clip and, again, no problems with a render time of about one minute.
I think this is a far easier and faster approach than stop motion and it allows one to modify the exact final speed to one's liking.
Having said that, Capture Magic (similar to DV Rack) is another direct-to-disk dv (or hdv) stream recorder that has variable record rate settings.

[Lee Berger]

Originally Posted by Eric Mayrand

I think this is a far easier and faster approach than stop motion and it allows one to modify the exact final speed to one's liking.

I agree to some extent. I've taped events at normal speed and then increased the speed for a time lapse like effect. However stop motion is essential when you need to cover a full day of time lapse (such as the tide going out and coming back in) as you only get an hour from a Mini DV load. Changing tapes risks moving the camera and digitizing hours of tape eats up drive space. For short events recording in real time and speeding up works great.

[Greg Laves]

Originally Posted by Max Volki

Time lapse

No video camera I know can shoot single frames, like the old movie cameras.

If I am not mistaken, I think the Panasonic AJ-HDX900 will do 1 frame interval records, with a minimum time between shots of 1 second.

[Lee Berger]

According to the manual the single frame recording is achieved using the camera's prerecord memory. This is the same function that allows you to record a few seconds before you punch the record start. Excellent for capturing lightning. Also this is a $26,000 camcorder. I'll bet the P2 cameras can do the same thing recording to solid state memory. I wonder what the EX series can do. I'm too lazy to research any further.

[Hugh Mobley]

Originally Posted by Lee Berger

I agree. I tried it and the minimum interval of 15 frames was too long. I captured the footage into Final Cut Pro 6 and interestingly enough it created 5 frame clips for each 15 frame interval. Recombined on a timeline they produced a good timelapse. Here is a link to my experiment on Vimeo
Timelapse of Sangre De Christo Mountians in Colorado on Vimeo

I tried two settings on the V1 the first 1/2 sec for each minute. let it run an hour, and the second 2 secs for each minute and let it run an hour, each set of clips when put on the timeline produced unsatisafactory results, jerky payback. I am using Vegas 8 which did not change the #of frames like yours. So this did not work for me at all yet. suggestions?

[Lee Berger]

You could try increasing the speed of the clip.

[Chris Medico]

I can use my nNovia external hard drive to do this. Just program it to the frame rate and turn it on. The video streams out on the firewire port onto the drive. Download the finished file to the computer when you are done.

Also the EX1 can do this right out of the box onto its memory cards.