I’ve seen a couple of very interesting Time Lapse movies and I have been investigating the best techniques for shooting and putting one together. I found one pretty good tutorial on the equipment needed and technique and decided to try one out.

In this video I collapsed 16 minutes down to 6 seconds running at 6 frames per second. The recommended timing for time lapse videos is 10 to 15 frames a second, so I ran it pretty slow, but this 16 second video is short and 15 frames a second ended up running on about 10 secnds long. The first time I uploaded the video to YouTube I had compressed the video down in MPEG4 to 320X240 at 6 fps and then uploaded it and it turned out really ugly and pixelated. Then, I just turned around and uploaded the full size .mov quicktime file (69 MB) which was 1000X667 at 6 fps and it handled YouTube’s compression pretty well.

This one turned ok for a first attempt. I think I should have dragged my shutter on the camera more to blur the motion. I think I’m going to try this again at night sometime on a busy street corner to get headlights moving down the street. It would aslo be fun to do with a parade. So, be on the look out for more time lapse experiments.