Key Question Ab0ut Z1u And Time Lapse...

[Nicholas Natteau]

We all know that the Sony Z1U and FX1 do not have time-lapse or interval recording possibility. For me personally, a great shame. I can do without the memory stick. But the picture quality on the Sony Z1U is so amazing, I think it's such a shame that Sony killed the interval recording function.

So here's is my question: Does anyone know of a device you could hook up to the Sony Z1U via a lanc cable that could tell the camera to record in frame mode (six frames) every minute???

The Z1U does have frame mode recording. So I would imagine that to do time lapse it would just be a question of setting the camera to frame record mode, and having an external device tell the camera to record at set intervals.

Eagerly awaiting feedback on this. Thanks in advance.

- Nicholas

[Ignacio Rodriguez]

Adobe Premiere can do this with DV cameras with it's stop-motion feature. I guess if you set up the camera to operate in DV-out mode, Premiere might be able to do it. Of course it means lugging around a laptop...

[David Cherniack]

Nicholas,

The frame function only works in DV/DVcam mode. No HDV function according to the manual.

[Eric James]

The reason they don't have it for HDV is because it uses a 15 frame GOP. You can use lanc from a computer to do the same thing. The limiting factor is that you can only record in 15 frame increments.

My 2 c,
Eric James

[John Jay]

if you are handy with a soldering iron, know how to code and your PC has a parallel i/f

then sending periodic record lanc data shouldnt be a problem?


http://vec.mine.nu/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0

[Ignacio Rodriguez]

> The limiting factor is that you can only
> record in 15 frame increments.

Very good point! Of course... it's a limitation of the format... but if the camera were to stay on it could be written to a buffer and then to tape in gops... still quite a complication, not as easy as with DV, but doable if the camera's manufacturer were up to it.

[David Cherniack]

I can't find anything about stop-frame animation in the Premiere Pro help.pdf file, even though it's listed in the index. Anyone know where it is?

[Stacy Rothwell]

Interval recording was dropped from Premiere when they released Premiere Pro 1.0.

You'll have to resurrect version 6.5 to use the interval recording features.....

[David Cherniack]

I resurrected an old copy of 6.0 and read up on the stop frame capture. Never having used it, it seems that it would only capture to dv from the firewire output of the camera if the camera is set to output dv. But if the camera is outputing HDV and the WinXP SP2 HDV device control is installed anyone have an educated guess what would happen? And what if the AspectHD codec for Premiere 6.5 was installed?

[Robert Reinhardt]

It's a shame, I agree. I love the TL recording feature on my Sony DVCAM/DV cams. I'm testing using the still interval recording feature with a 2gb mem stick duo, but still, it's not nearly as convenient as doing it to tape.

-Robert

[Matt Davis]

Originally Posted by Nicholas Natteau

Eagerly awaiting feedback on this. Thanks in advance.

This may be an unpopular comment, but have you considered a stills camera for this? I do a lot of event work where the 'build' is something the client is keen to capture - maybe a day's worth of activity as a stage or tent goes up.

Maybe it's something simple like watching a huge auditorium fill up before a big plenary, or showing the ebb and flow of a dinner. That could be done with an hour or two's worth of tape, but it's a lot of time to ingest.

I invested in a HDD recorder, but it also requires a whole different power supply and batteries, and it proved fragile.

So for the last two years I've used a stills camera - a little Pentax that can do 99 shots over time (for example 1 shot every 30 secs means resetting it every hour or so). It's small, discrete, doesn't require a laptop, has a full manual mode as well as many auto modes, and if I shoot 1600x1200, I can do things like long slow creep zooms and subtle rotates with the resultant movie.

It's worked very well, but the 99 frames (4 seconds in PAL land) is a bit of a limitation - but the success of its shots means I now have enough cash to buy a better camera without this limitation, and I'll know that the investment will be paid back in a set time. :-)

And (more tellingly) I can get on and shoot pick-ups and detail whilst the time-lapse goes on.

Get a stills camera with intervalometer - it's the way to go.