Photographers: Time lapse Q (need answer fast!)

Factual Questions
1

Hi!

We’re planning on decorating our Christmas tree tonight and I had the idea to do a time-lapse video of it using my old Minolta Dimage A1, which has a built-in intervalometer.

How quickly often should I have it snap a picture? Every second? Every 10 seconds? 30 seconds? I probably should have put this in IMHO, I suppose. Anyway, I’m hoping to do this tonight.

Thanks!

RS

2

How long a) do you want the video to be (and how many frames/second), and b) how long is your Christmas light cycle?

3

Your video will be 24 frames per second, you can do the math from there…for example if you plan on taking 60 minutes to decorate the tree and take a picture every 30 seconds you’ll end up with 5 seconds of video (120 pictures/24) - probably shorter than you want so you could adjust accordingly (every 10 seconds will give you a 15 second final product for example).

4

beowulff: Thanks, but I’m actually taking a time-lapse of the tree being decorated.

zombywoof: Good point. I figure an hour of decorating, so every, say, 10 seconds would give me, uh, carry the one, 12 seconds (at 30 frames/second). I’m not sure if my camera battery will last longer than 360 shots anyway, so I guess I’ll go with that.

Thanks, guys! I really should have just done the calculations.

5

Right, 12s @ 30fps (or 15s @24fps, I guess I shouldn’t have said it “will be” 24fps since the framerate you choose to combine them at is up to you.)

6

Actually, it’s up to the camera. The A1 doesn’t have options like that. Anyway, the tree is about half-decorated. Thanks again, all – the board always comes through.

RS

7

Does the camera assemble the interval frames into a video file itself?

I’d have thought it would just take a series of still pictures, which would then need to be converted to a video on a computer (at which point, the desired framerate could be chosen).

8

Turns out, it can work either way. I thought it could only create a video, but it has two settings. I thought I was creating a video, but I ended up creating 120 pictures (the smallest interval this camera allows is 30 secs). I used Picasa to assemble them, and that does allow you to set the frame rate. I created a 10 second video.

For an older digital camera, the A1 really had some cool pro-like features.