Print PDF
Favorite
Email
Step 6Take Pictures!
Now with your camera fully assembled and your timer circuit wired up and connected -- you should be able to take some sweet time lapse photos ready to be put into an awesome time lapse video :)
How do you make time lapse video? If you search Google for free Time Lapse software -- it's a nightmare. If you happen to have found something that will string together images into video - for free; please share :) Otherwise, here's my inefficient method of making video out of these images for free (paid for with time).
First, we need a few things.
1. Movie Salsa -- this is software explicitly for stringing images together, and is shareware (free to try type of deal). You can Download it here
2. Other Movie Software - I'm using Windows Movie Maker 2 (aka mm2) because it's bundled with you windows folk
If you're using a mac... I think imovie2 has a time lapse function, but I'm 100% sure quicktime Pro does (for those of you that paid the $30 for it).
Why?
Well, first I tried taking mm2 and setting the default image time to .125 seconds and importing all my pictures. That worked fine for a small batch of images. mm2 has a rather interesting
flaw known as the "complexity barrier" - movie files that have too many clips, transitions, effects etc. etc. just won't render. 800+ images is beyond the complexity barrier :p The solution
is to break up the render process into smaller chunks - then combine them into a final video. This takes quite some time.
Solution
Movie Salsa will render images into video much faster (and more easily) than mm2 can. Not to mention, movie salsa will grab a whole directory and go to town rather than importing into some newfangled library. The drawback is -- the free version of movie salsa will only do 50 images locked at 10 frames per second (each images gets .1 seconds). This still works depending on your photo delay. I do support the small time programmers, and honestly - I'm thinking abut buying movie salsa for my personal use :)
On to directions
1. Taking 50 sequential chunks of images - and put them into labeled folders (1,2,3... etc.)
2. Render each folder into separate video files using movie salsa -- be sure to play with the video size and don't forget to make a unique name for each video
3. Import all of your new video into mm2
4. Add each video to the mm2 time line
5. Save your movie file (follow on screen prompts)
6. Upload to the inter web and share with the world :)
Considerations
Remember that when you're dealing with 800+ images -- it's a bit of work to separate into 50 image chunks. But believe me, it's not as bad as doing the whole task with mm2 alone. If you want to save time, go ahead and buy move salsa, Quicktime pro, or whatever third party software you'd like :) This is simply the poor man's (cough: college student) method to get around with free to try software.
How do you make time lapse video? If you search Google for free Time Lapse software -- it's a nightmare. If you happen to have found something that will string together images into video - for free; please share :) Otherwise, here's my inefficient method of making video out of these images for free (paid for with time).
First, we need a few things.
1. Movie Salsa -- this is software explicitly for stringing images together, and is shareware (free to try type of deal). You can Download it here
2. Other Movie Software - I'm using Windows Movie Maker 2 (aka mm2) because it's bundled with you windows folk
If you're using a mac... I think imovie2 has a time lapse function, but I'm 100% sure quicktime Pro does (for those of you that paid the $30 for it).
Why?
Well, first I tried taking mm2 and setting the default image time to .125 seconds and importing all my pictures. That worked fine for a small batch of images. mm2 has a rather interesting
flaw known as the "complexity barrier" - movie files that have too many clips, transitions, effects etc. etc. just won't render. 800+ images is beyond the complexity barrier :p The solution
is to break up the render process into smaller chunks - then combine them into a final video. This takes quite some time.
Solution
Movie Salsa will render images into video much faster (and more easily) than mm2 can. Not to mention, movie salsa will grab a whole directory and go to town rather than importing into some newfangled library. The drawback is -- the free version of movie salsa will only do 50 images locked at 10 frames per second (each images gets .1 seconds). This still works depending on your photo delay. I do support the small time programmers, and honestly - I'm thinking abut buying movie salsa for my personal use :)
On to directions
1. Taking 50 sequential chunks of images - and put them into labeled folders (1,2,3... etc.)
2. Render each folder into separate video files using movie salsa -- be sure to play with the video size and don't forget to make a unique name for each video
3. Import all of your new video into mm2
4. Add each video to the mm2 time line
5. Save your movie file (follow on screen prompts)
6. Upload to the inter web and share with the world :)
Considerations
Remember that when you're dealing with 800+ images -- it's a bit of work to separate into 50 image chunks. But believe me, it's not as bad as doing the whole task with mm2 alone. If you want to save time, go ahead and buy move salsa, Quicktime pro, or whatever third party software you'd like :) This is simply the poor man's (cough: college student) method to get around with free to try software.
| « Previous Step | Download PDFView All Steps | Next Step » |
My next project requires a long duration time-lapse. One or two frames per day over several months in a lava tube cave to study cave slime. Your Instructable is just the ticket to get me going, as my previous stuff relied on a laptop computer for intervelometer.
Thanks!
Simply open the first image, set your preferences such as compression (it saves as AVI, but uncompressed AVI's are big so choose xvid, divx, or like I do a lossless codec if you want to edit the film later) and maybe framerate
Then Save As and specify output avi filename.
I use it to handle upto 5000 images at once, but it can cope with a lot more (see http://narrowboat.blip.tv or http://narrowbo.at).
I may try this with an old 2MP camera I have.
http://www.giantscreamingrobotmonkeys.com/monkeyjam/index.html
Stop motion and time lapse are time consuming just figuring out all the programs, cameras, and then editing programs to upload them to video hosting sites.
Here is a Stopmo site that has a current listing of most of the freeware that is available for both Time Lapse and Stop Motion. Most of the programs are frame grabbers...
Stop Motion Works