Creating a "time lapse" video

[Zelmo]

Greetings!

My old Canon A1-Digital Hi-8 camcorder had an internal function called "time lapse." It would shoot about 1 second of video, then pause for a prescribed number of seconds, then shoot another second, etc.

My new Panasonic SD1 doesn't have that feature, so I'd like to find a way to fake it; shoot normal video, then create the time lapse in post-production editing.

Does anyone know of a filter or script compatible with VS-10 that would automate this? I don't have the patience to manually chop up the video into segments and then delete the "intermediate" clips.

Thanks,

-doug-

[sjj1805]

MultiTrim may be the best way to do it


You would have to do it manually of course and use butons 2 & 3 shown above

[Black Lab]

I know what you mean, and I tried a Google search, but "time lapse" isn't the correct term. Time lapse is when something is recorded over a long period of time, such as an entire day, then played back in, say, one minute. Stop motion is not the correct term either. That's when you video or photograph something, stop and reposition it, then video again. What you want to do (and I'm interested too) is to remove frames so the video "jumps" or "skips". If someone knows the correct terminology I'm sure a filter could be found.

[Ron P.]

I've always know it as Time-Lapse also, or Time-Delay. My mother has a VHS-C camcorder that has that function. Several years ago I used it to create an animated Christmas video from some statues (santa claus). Talk about an experience. I spent literally 14 hrs shooting, and another 2 hrs, dubbing audio, all done the old fashion way, using a VHS recorder for the final product.

[bop]

How about the "strobe Motion" filter

[sjj1805]

I think what he is trying to achieve is like in those nature programs where you see a flower grow and then open up, all in the matter of 30 seconds.

[jparnold]

I used to have an old analogue video camera which could record (say) 3 seconds of video and then automatically go into pause mode for a preset (via a menu) time (eg 5 minutes) and then record again. This would (as Steve points out) allow say a flower bud appear to open in a very short period of time.
If this is the effect required then Steve's 'tutorial' should reproduce it although you would need to leave the camera rolling for a very long period of time (however long it takes a bud to open or whatever you are trying to time compress).

You could also speed up the playback using PLAYBACK SPEED but you can only increase speed up to 1000% or 10 times faster than original eg 10 seconds of original video played back in 1 second. This probably isn't enough.

The other effect which others have considered is STROBE.

[Underscore]

Greetings!

My old Canon A1-Digital Hi-8 camcorder had an internal function called "time lapse." It would shoot about 1 second of video, then pause for a prescribed number of seconds, then shoot another second, etc.

My new Panasonic SD1 doesn't have that feature, so I'd like to find a way to fake it; shoot normal video, then create the time lapse in post-production editing.

Does anyone know of a filter or script compatible with VS-10 that would automate this? I don't have the patience to manually chop up the video into segments and then delete the "intermediate" clips.

Thanks,

-doug-

To not quite answer the question you asked, I use winDV to capture the footage from my camcorder and it has the ability to capture every Nth frame. Set this to 60, for instance, and 1 minute of real time will be accelerated to 1 second of footage. You can download the utility from here.

_

[railroadguy]

Thanks for posting that. Great little program for possible special effects being able to capture every nth frame. Works well with my Canopus.

[mikemoon]

I too like the Nth frame capture.
Does anyone know of software that will do the same for an existing AVI (or whatever format) digital file?
I have the camcorder with minidv, but the tape won't last a whole day.
I have my Xacti and I could easily get 10hours from my 1gig card.

Thanks,

Mike

[etech6355]

Mike,As previously posted you can do it in VS by speeding up the project along with changing the frame_rate & using frame_based for the fielding.
I have made some time lapse videos in VS and use the MJPEG codec as an intermediate codec. Reason being you can render to 12 or 15fps frame_based (video only). This framerate change along with speeding up playback results in time-lapse.
But you have to work out the math.

Another video program I have does this right from it's timeline.
Playback speed + Frames_Per_Second will give you time lapse video in that program. To keep it simple though I just set it to 1 frame per second.
I can't remember the name of the program, memory time lapse problem I guess.