Something from this morning: testing the new motorised slider

Insofar as I can tell on my rather antiquated equipment *jr* the slider seems to be smooth and wayyyy better than trying to achieve the same effect moving the camera by hand I'd be interested to know how the video looks on your computer. Is it all smooth (slider and video) or are there any technical issues to solve? Are you able to adjust the speed of either the slider or the timelapse rendering?

it's a bit complicated but ...in brief..the camera tracks along a dolly system pulling itself along a CNC timing belt. The motor is powered and controlled by an arduino. The camera is a panasonic GH1 hacked to take video at 2 frames per second and then recombined using timelapser [http://timelapser.net/about/]. Using timelapser allows for different "playback speed" in the video file. Using the arduino allows for the speed of the 2RPM motor to be set at compile time, although the next upgrade I plan will be to be able to control the speed of the slider from the android phone over bluetooth.

Here's a video of an earlier version of the system travelling along without a camera attached, showing the distance sensor that shuts the system down when it reaches the end of the run.
slider

I'm pretty happy with the video produced...now the weather needs to come to the party...

Great work JR!

Looks very impressive John and way beyond my knowledge of electronics I was imaging a simple clockwork device you wind up with a key!

Fantastic work, John. This is something that holds much interest for me too, though my technical knowledge is still in the dark ages. My inspiration comes from NZ native, Tom Lowe of TimeScapes fame. The closest I could get was getting my name in the credits on the upcoming DVD/Blu-ray of the same name.

Super helpful thread and some great timelapses in here.

I've just been practising in my back yard. Yet to capture any storms but been enjoying it anyway, slowly refining the process.

I'm using a GO Pro2 - http://gopro.com/products/?gclid=CN-asLXfpLICFfBUpgodqA0A7g Great little camera that can do 1,2,5,10,15,30 second time lapses with a huge field of view. Only problem is there's a slight fish eye effect when using the Wide setting. Can also do 120 frames per second video which will be great when I manage to get a lightning bolt, will be able to slow it right down - should be able to get return strokes, maybe the stepped leader etc.

My workflow at the moment which is subject to change -

- Collect photos in folder (I've had 8,000 in one time lapse, so can take some time for my oldish PC to deal with them)
- Use Adobe Lightroom to batch process and resize all the photos in one hit. I usually tell it to resize to 1920x1080 (tick checkbox 'no stretch'), it spits out 1440x1080 probably because of the aspect ratio of the original (non-widescreen)
- Open Quicktime Pro, File - Open Image Sequence. 15 frames per second seems to work well, depends on how many photos you have. Select the first photo and then it builds a quicktime movie. Save it (which is often over 1GB raw)


My biggest problem so far is compressing the video into a more reasonable file size. I've tried saving as .avi, .mp4 and it often ends up looking darker, and not as good...have tried increasing bitrate but still isn't 100% as I'd like it.

http://vimeo.com/47224216

That's a super professional but would like that same kind of quality with a compressed video. Obviously when you compress you lose quality but trying to find the balance is tricky! Will keep trying.

Wow that link you posted is up there with one of the best time lapse vids ive seen! Best of luck working out the compression rate!

Thanks angre. I'd never expect to do one as good as that one on a technical level. Shows how good timelapses can get when you have the time and money to spend

I could help you out a bit with video encoding and compression, but only if you were using linux and were comfortable with ffmpeg or mencoder from the command line. As a high level guide, 720p HD video lasting half and hour at 25fps should take up approx 350mb, when encoded with a bitrate of 3000. This is using the h264 encoding, 48000kb/s audio at high quality libmp3lame encoding, and an avi container.

I record and upload minecraft videos from linux, so you have to learn all this complicated stuff

I've had so much fun with minecraft + a bunch of friends berga. Brilliant game We had a server up for a while.

I've got linux on an old box here, probably not good enough for video encoding though.

Thanks for the tips. I'll try those settings out in quicktime...I'm pretty sure it can encode to h264.

Another thing I find a bit confusing is frame rates. I've got Sony Vegas and when creating a project you have to pick a frame rate, but it only has the standard ones and won't let me choose 15 or other odd frames-rates I use with time lapses.

Need to play around with it more but don't like the idea of a 15fps video being turned into 24 or 25 when exporting. I'm sure there's a good way of doing it but seems like it would not play as smoothly. Maybe at 30fps it would playback smooth - each frame of the original shown for 2 frames of the 30fps. Does my head in a bit!

h264 is a pretty good format. You will only start to notice fuzz when you drop the bitrate to below 1500.

As for frame rates. the recorded rate to the encoded rate doesn't have to match. If you are exporting all your frames as images, then when you encode it at say, 30fps, all that will happen is your 30 frames (taken over two seconds if you were recording at 15fps) will be shown in 1 second, so to your eye it will appear sped up. If you want to avoid the speed up, then you are right that there are options which will duplicate frames, but too much duplication will introduce a jerking motion.

15fps is hovering around the boundary of where the human eye can notice this jerking motion, as your brain on average holds an image in your memory for 1 fifteenth of a second. So you're skirting the edges of it.

Also in regards to the video being darker, this is a bitrate issue. The higher the bitrate, the less darkening, the bigger your file. You can try and cope with this by adding gamma correction, but once again, if you lower the bitrate too much, you will get a washed out effect.

Sorry i cannot help more, at the end of the day it is all just trial and error. I would export the same inputs over and over with different settings, then watch em all one after the other and home in on what you think is best. Time consuming i know, but probably the only guaranteed way forward.

good luck.

Hello Chris

Try this encoder http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html

Look forward to seeing your work

Thanks Snorky I'll give that a try!

Berga - Forgot to mention I'm importing the 15fps video file into a 25fps project, it keeps the playback at the same speed as you get with 15fps..unless I tick a box which switches the 15fps to 25fps (as you said playing in 1 sec rather than 2) So I've got this nice .mov at 15fps which looks smooth, importing it into a video editor to edit (which only lets me select the common FPS values) I want the same speed as I have in the original 15fps file...I make the edits and then export which spits out a 25fps file. It plays back at the same relative speed as the 15fps but it's a bit glitchy - I was guessing it was because dividing 15 frames into 25 gives you 1.6666 frames of my original video for every 1 frame of the exported video. I suppose some kind of time stretching is enabled to let the 25fps export play same relative speed as original.

This is something I'll figure out, will just take some time. Need to learn my editor more thoroughly and read up some basics of digital video. Exporting a bunch of videos under different settings is a great idea, and thanks for the tip about bit-rates and darkening.

my lightning timlapse 27/11/12, from clare valley over looking Blyth plains
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ethmurray/8223859954/in/photostream great to watch the storm roll through

That's unbelievably good Ethan! What equipment and settings did you use?

Just looked at your other photos - Epic....I like how you got the lava-lamp like structure of the clouds, nice rain curtain and clear bolts.

i used a Nikon d5100 with f/1.4 50mm prime f stop was at f2.8 for most of it and they were 45 second exposures

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyP1v5FTgKk
A short timelapse at The Breakaways outside of Coober Pedy on Good Friday.