Nov
01
2007
Supper’s ready in 80 seconds…Playing with Time Lapse
Posted by: Dean Shareski in Personal, Video, digital stories, digitalstorytelling, funI’ve also appreciated the use of time lapse photography. From watching a flower bloom to the changing of seasons, it’s a powerful technique.
I checked my Canon SD750 and realized it had the feature. So let’s give it a try.
I set it up tonight while I prepared a meal for my family and our friends. The total time of preparation was about 50 minutes. I set the time lapse to shoot every 2 seconds. What you have is about 2 minutes which I cut down to about 80 seconds. If you look carefully you should see a spill, boy in underwear and puppies.
This will prove to be a valuable tool for me. Check your digital camera and see if you can do time lapse. I think it’s very cool.
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November 1st, 2007 at 9:07 pm
Wow! A great tool…can’t wait to try it out; although my making supper would require bringing the camera, people and puppies to The Franklin. I don’t make supper, I make supper possible
November 1st, 2007 at 9:16 pm
You made my head hurt with coolness.
November 1st, 2007 at 9:17 pm
Lona,
I’d still like to see it.
November 1st, 2007 at 9:48 pm
Time lapse photography is always neat.
If only we could actually see what you’re doing in the kitchen when you’re on the left hand side…
November 1st, 2007 at 9:49 pm
Very cool Dean, I’ve done this before with science related projects but never in such an anthropological context. This turned out great.
November 1st, 2007 at 11:19 pm
High quality music, too
Perfect for the action.
A physics teacher in my school stumbled - his students did, actually - upon this one: iSight on iMovie has a time-lapse record feature for the webcam. He had students film some physics experiments with it to capture moments of bodies in collision (or something - I haven’t seen them) that regular speed wouldn’t catch.
What a world it’s all become.
November 2nd, 2007 at 8:05 pm
Well Dean, you definitely have better production values (and a cleaner kitchen) than I do…. I tried a very similar little segment back earlier this summer, the day that my new $100 Flip video camera came in the mail. I was just messing around to see how it performed, and then I dumped it onto my laptop, used Windows Movie Maker’s double speed feature a few times (so the finished product is 8x) and then put it up on YouTube. Not for any particular reason other than to try it out, but somehow my students have found it (with zero advertisement on my part) and love it. Of course for $100 I didn’t get time lapse, but still got to mitigate that on the editing end.
November 2nd, 2007 at 8:10 pm
Hi Dean,
That’s a great little clip
I’ve been mucking around with time lapse for a couple of years now. It’s such a powerful video effect, and it’s really quite simple to create a good time lapse video, even with very basic hardware/software…
I posted my most recent time lapse effort to this webpage:
http://www.sjsd.net/~amckiel/playdough
Same general concept as yours — taking care of chores in the kitchen ;-}
Looking forward to the MB Edubloggercon,
Andy
November 2nd, 2007 at 8:50 pm
Rich and Andy,
For teachers, I think the ability to create this automatically is nice. Plus a DV tape is only an hour, I think I could do this for about 3 with my camera.
Do you think there’s a difference between using the time lapse feature and simply increasing speed? I don’t know.
Thanks for sharing…interesting ideas.
November 2nd, 2007 at 9:28 pm
I think there’s a huge difference between increasing the speed of standard video footage vs. capturing still photos and putting them together to create a time lapse series. Although they are similar in nature, I feel that sped up video screams sped up video. Time lapse is a little more subtle…
For certain things that I’ve tried to capture through time lapse, it just hasn’t been an effective technique to use. Sometimes the ability to take pictures as quickly as once a second just isn’t fast enough. I, personally, don’t like watching time lapse if it appears too disjointed. If I create a clip and it appears too random or ‘busy’, I don’t think twice away deleting it, even if it took hours to capture.
This is probably all just a matter of opinion, but I want to be able to ‘predict’ most of the movements and actions that I am seeing in time lapse. IMHO, this predictability that comes with good time lapse is something that you just don’t find in video that’s been sped up too quickly.
The only application I’ve worked with to create time lapse is iStopMotion for the Mac. It’s so easy to use that anyone can create very professional time lapse clips. You can choose your frame rate, then decide how often you’d like to capture photos: the number of seconds, minutes, hours, days… the possibilities are endless…
This same application has basic voiceover capabilities, allows you to export your clips to a number of different video formats for use within other video editing applications, and even some basic compositing tools (you can change foregrounds or backgrounds. However, I’ve found that the picture quality of the built-in iSight cameras on MacBooks is far inferior to any external DV camera I’ve tried. I’ve lost several potentially beautiful time lapse clips of gorgeous prairie sunsets to the poor quality of the built-in iSight camera… Also, the compositing features of iStopMotion aren’t nearly as classy as the chroma key work you do with your green screens, Dean
November 2nd, 2007 at 9:36 pm
Nice distinction…I kind of thought that but you’ve articulated it well.
The sunset/sky scenes are what I want to attempt next. I’m also going to investigate using my GL2 Canon DV Canon to even better quality.
See you in Winnipeg.
November 4th, 2007 at 9:18 am
This was really neat. It has me thinking about some possibilities. What program did you use after you had all your time lapse photos taken? Ann
November 4th, 2007 at 10:21 am
Ann,
I didn’t use any program. That’s the video straight off my Canon Digital camera.
November 16th, 2007 at 8:49 am
Nice Site!