Any advice on a time lapse project?

[Stradawhovious]

We are supposed to get anywhere from 10 - 20 inches of snow, and I thought it would be fun to document it. I have the camera set up in the front window on a timer to snap a pic every thirty seconds, and plan on putting them all into windows movie maker to make a time lapse movie.

Any suggestions on how to better this with a different approach?

 

[vivalaveritas]

I always thought that in time lapse you get a shot every few min., not few secs. I might be wrong on that though.

 

[dxqcanada5]

Based on the expected snow fall rate ... you might be better off in minutes as V mentioned.

 

[Josh66]

How long are you going to let it run for? It sounds like it would have to be at least a couple hours...

With 2 hours of shooting one every 30 seconds - you would have 240 frames. At 24 frames/second, that's only 10 seconds. So, one every 30 seconds does not sound like too many to me...

6 hours of shooting would still only give you a 30 second movie.


vvv EDIT vvv
6 Hours would be 720 frames ... which is a lot, but still manageable. What software do you have?

I would think the PP would be minimal, so that shouldn't actually be too bad. You could most likely just do it all in one big batch.

Figure out how long you're going to let the camera run, then figure out what the frame rate will be and some kind of target movie length - that will tell you the frequency that you need to take them.

If the camera is going to run for 6 hours, and you want a 2 minute movie at 24 frames per second, you need 2880 frames, which would be one every 7.5 seconds over a 6 hour period.

 

[DannyInMontana]

Run it in minutes or you will regret how annoying it will be to sort through all the frames. I do look forward to seeing this as watching snowfall and accumulate is one of my favorite things in life. enjoy!

 

[Stradawhovious]

Thanks for the responses! It will be interesting to see what I come up with. The problem now is that its really really windy. A lot of snow is falling, but the visual accumulation is at a minimum.

I'm using windows movie maker which allows for a minimum viewing duraation of .125 of a second. according to my (probably wrong) math, after 6 hours this would yield a 96 second movie.

Should be an interesting experiment!