I photograph all my son’s swim meets. Recently, I decided to try something different. In addition to the “normal” pictures I shoot every week I decided to do a time-lapse of the whole meet from set up to take down.
I set a camera on the roof of the club overlooking the pool and the lawn. I had to arrive early, around 6 AM to set up before all the people began arriving. I calculated that I wanted to take one picture every five seconds and that I was going to be shooting for between eight and nine hours. That came out to 720 pictures an hour, so I knew I would need to be able to capture between 5,760 and 6,480 images! My biggest concern was memory cards since the biggest CF cards I own are 16GB and I knew that would not be enough. Fortunately the Canon 1Ds Mark3 has two card slots, one CF and one SD, so I took the 16GB Lexar Professional SD card from my son’s Rebel camera and put it alongside my 16GB Lexar Professional CF card and I knew I would have enough storage!
I set the camera with a 24mm 1.8 L lens up on the roof anchored to my Feisol 3372 tripod. I set the Canon TC 80N3 intervalometer timer to record one frame every five seconds until the cards were full or I turned it off.
When I was done I had 6,233 images. Next, I placed them all into one folder and used image processor in Photoshop CS5 on my MacPro to resize them to 1080 x 720 so they would fit a “normal” HD movie format. Then using Quicktime Pro I turned them into a time-lapse movie that I saved as a .mov file format. I choose to output at 30 frames per second because the time-lapse will be incorporated into an end of the year slideshow and I didn’t want it to go too long! Next I used Wondershare Video Converter to export the .mov file and convert it to .mp4 format that will share between platforms easier. While this sounds complicated, it is actually very easy. Quicktime took just three to four minutes to create the time lapse and that is a one-click process, converting it to mp4 took another three to four minutes!
I also experimented and tried outputting the time lapse at different frame rates to see how they looked. Personally I like the one at 30 frames a second the best because you have more time to see the action and it does not move so fast. But if you do your own time lapse sequences, I recommend you experiment with different frame rates to see what looks best to you.
Now I am excited about trying other time lapse sequences, I am envisioning capturing a great sunrise, sunset, or the night sky! There are so many possibilities!
