Sunday, March 15, 2009

Time Lapse

OK for the concrete canoe guys, some technical info from my limited time-lapse experience:

I use a Pentax Optio 30 waterproof camera on "Interval Shoot" mode. I believe the Oregon Scientific ATC3K video camera has a similar mode, but much less resolution.

I import the photos with Picasa3. There is a button above the folder that says "create movie". You specify a soundtrack (must be in mp3 format), then select "fit photos to sound track" option and it will set the duration of each photo automatically.

You can put captions on the photos in Picasa and choose to display them if you like, or put annotations in later after uploading to YouTube.

Put whatever you want on the title slide using that tab, then hit "create movie". It takes about ten minutes or more, depending upon what resolution you use for the original photos - I am using 2MP (whatever that is) to keep processing time down though my camera will do much more than that.

Pick a song no longer than 3 minutes. Nobody wants to suffer through 6 minutes of somebody laying stuff up, unless you really have a lot of photos and it is a big project. Pick an obscure jazz or other tune, or YouTube will eventually disable your soundtrack for copyright violations.

For short 1-2 hour wet layups I started with a photo interval of 30 sec. This is too long. For the vid below I am down to 20 sec interval and about 600 photos, which will cover 200 minutes of layup (or whatever). I think 15 sec would be better but it depends upon the length of the song, length of project and how much memory your camera has.

That's it. Go make some movies - the world is waiting!

2 comments:

Phil Stevenson said...

Karl,
Too much workshop and boffin stuff. You really need to go sailing. How come you missed the moth regatta over the weekend?
Phil

Karl said...

Um, what's a boffin? I suppose if I have to ask...

This is what happens when you stick completely experimental stuff on the boat: you end up fiddling endlessly, building new controls, new components etc.

As for the regatta, I was hosting some family from out of town. I'm not quite ready for a moderate air regatta anyway - still a couple of things to add, and that is a challenging condition with my current setup.