Will Head
Time lapse footage is a great way to add extra interest to a film, and with today’s camcorders, it’s easier to shoot than you think.
Time-lapse footage is a great way to enhance your film projects – especially if you want to show lots of activity taking place without making your overall video too long. The idea is simple: instead of shooting 25fps as you would normally, you drop down to a much longer interval between frames – from one second to even hours between shots, depending on how much activity there is. When you play the footage back at normal rate, the result will be speeded up and you’ll see time flash by as each shot changes.
To get good time-lapse footage, two things are essential: a tripod and patience. Before you start, you’ll need to find a spot where your camcorder won’t be disturbed. Since you’ll be speeding up the footage once it’s on your Mac, any movement of the camera will cause jerkiness in the final cut, so using a tripod is a must. It’s best to set the tripod as far away from people as possible so it doesn’t get accidentally knocked, and to avoid someone getting too close and filling the frame. You’ll also need a lot of time. Normal video runs at 25fps, so even if you’re only using one frame every second, it will take two hours to get five minutes of footage.
The simplest way to create a time-lapse video is to leave the camera recording as normal, and then chop the individual frames you want out of the footage, although this is also the most labour intensive. The downside of this approach is that you have to record in real time so you’re limited to the maximum time you can fit on a single tape, and you’ll then need to spend time chopping out the individual frames you want. If you shot an hour of footage, for example, and you wanted a still every 10 seconds, you’d need to chop out 360 individual frames. You could try speeding up the footage in your editing program, but if the result still appears jerky, you may have to resort to manually cutting out individual frames.
Luckily, there are ways around this. The simplest is to hook up your camera to your Mac and then use software to capture the timed frames for you. If you’re looking for a free option, then Gawker will do the job, but the maximum frame size it can capture is 640 x 480, so it’s only suitable if your final output is for the Internet or something with a resolution less than Pal DV.
If you want to be able to shoot standard-definition time lapse straight to your Mac, then iStopMotion from Boinx is an option. Prices start at $49 (about £32) and there’s a free trial available if you want to test it out first.
The downside of recording straight to your Mac is that it needs to be in the same location as the subject you’re shooting. While this is suitable for some scenarios, it’s not the most flexible of setups, especially if you’ve not got a MacBook. As time-lapse videos take a long time to film, you’ll also be without the machine for the duration of the shoot, and you’ll be reliant on battery power unless there’s mains electricity to hand.
Some DV camcorders offer a feature called Interval Record, which can be used for time-lapse capture. Instead of shooting constantly, you set the interval between shots, and the camcorder starts a timer and captures footage at each interval. Due to the way the camcorder works, you’ll need to shoot more than one frame – usually at least 15 – as the tape has to spin up before it can start recording. When you import the footage into your Mac, you can speed it up by an extreme amount – say, 1500% – and you’ll be left with a time-lapse video.
If your DV camcorder doesn’t have an interval record function, you can use Sony’s HVR-MRC1K Compact Flash memory recording unit we looked at a couple of issues ago. This attaches to your camcorder’s FireWire port and records its output to a Compact Flash card. If you’re shooting standard-definition DV, you can use its interval record function to capture 0.5, 1, 1.5 or 2 seconds of footage every 30 seconds, 1, 5 or 10 minutes.
All these methods let you capture standard-definition time-lapse footage, but if you’re using HDV rather than DV, you can’t just set the camcorder in that mode due to the differences between how DV and HDV compression work. DV captures all the information for each frame while you’re recording, whereas HDV only captures some frames completely and just the changes between the frames in between to make it more efficient. The downside is that you can’t use interval record with an HDV stream, as the capture device needs a full frame to grab, and it doesn’t know when that will occur.
If you want create time-lapse videos in HD then a digital stills camera is a good option. The resolution of even the cheapest digital camera is far greater than the 1920 x 1080 frame size required for HD, and many can take pictures at a timed interval automatically. You can then simply drag the sequence of image files into your editing application and treat each still like a frame of video.
This does mean carrying another device around with you, which is fine if you know you’re going to be shooting time lapse, but it’s still another item to keep charged up and ready. If, however, your camcorder also has a digital camera function, that may be suitable for time lapse as well.
Sony’s HVR-A1E professional camcorder, for example, can shoot HDV to tape, but also has a camera function that captures to Memory Stick Duo. A 1920 x 1080 resolution snap takes up around 650KB, so a 1GB card can store 1700 images, which is enough to produce one minute of time-lapse footage at 25fps. It also features interval record, so you can set it to either 1, 5 or 10 minutes and then leave it going. When you’ve finished, you can then switch it back into video mode and carry on shooting as normal.
