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A second stab at time-lapse

I’m pretty addicted already…AND I’VE ONLY JUST BEGUN!

I decided to try more time-lapse today. Well, tonight. I attached my camera onto my car. I hooked up hard power via a power inverter to both my camera and my laptop. There were also steel safety cables just in case something went wrong.

I wanted to shoot at two or three frames per second (fps) but my computer’s intervalometer only allowed me to shoot down to five fps.

I started in my drive way, turned out onto a main street and just drove. At one point, I decided to stop at a McDonalds. I wasn’t really hungry; I just thought it might look interesting in the final product. I then turned onto another main drag and eventually got onto the interstate (yes, I was going 60mph with my camera attached to the outside of my car).

When I got home, I was anxious to see what I got. I rendered it out as 30fps video (standard video) and since I was only able to shoot five fps, It was REALLY fast.

I then slowed the playback down to 20fps. It was still too fast. I didn’t want to slow it down too much more because it would start to look choppy. A humans persistence of vision is 16fps. In other words, if you saw a sequence of images played at 16fps, your brain would interpret it as fluid motion, however awkward the speed may appear.

To get it slow enough, I broke persistence of vision and set the playback to 12fps. It definitely looks a little choppy but it gives each image a little more time on the screen so you can see what’s going on…kind of.

There is definitely more to come. I might try one with people in a more populated setting sometime this week. Maybe even tomorrow. Anyone have any suggestions? I might try the comment left by Gavin on the last post — use a slow shutter speed to virtually eliminate people from an urban setting. I wish I had a really powerful battery backup or solar power source to take my gear into rural areas. I could also use a nice intervalometer that’s not built into a computer. Where’s my winning lotto ticket?

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