Revision as of 17:52, 15 March 2014

Time-lapse

Time-lapsing is a trick of technology to get rid of our limited perception of time. By recording shots and playing them back at a different speed, one can reach to the other timescales, namely, the slow ones for time-lapses and the fast ones for slow-motion.

Our input

we currently work (as of 30 December (2013)) on time-lapsing of the Plaza Mayor from our vantage point at Mayorcita.

The Little People, our first timelapse of the Plaza Mayor was so successful that we uploaded it to the Internet, along with an interpretation of Alfonsina y el mar by Elena.
17 hours in the life of a Plaza Mayor, our second timelapse, this time at a reduced repetition rate (one image every 10 seconds) but for 17 hours.

Carlos Sanchez's input

Carlos is also exploring time-lapsing and once in a while release some publicly. Notable are:

Nubes desde la Plaza Mayor, a view of the Santa Cruz from our flat, the first timelapse from Mayorcita and with a camera.
Timescales, mainly clouds again, but this time with the view from our office.

Technical bits

We work both with our Nikon D40 camera and our HTC smartphone with (http://www.lapseit.com/ LapseIt].

The D40 has no built-in feature, se we recourse to gphoto2~[1].

The following is a basic setting to capture (here every 30s):

gphoto2 --capture-image-and-download --filename "%Y-%m-%d..%H%M%S.jpg" --interval 30

To assemble the frames into a movie (15 fps):

avconv -f image2 -r 15 -i imageSequence0000%04d.jpg-vcodec libx264 output.mp4

To add the timestamp on the image itself (say at position 10x470), use this script:

#!/bin/bash

timestamp=`date -r $1 +%H:%M`
echo $timestamp;
convert -draw "text 10,470 '$timestamp'" $1 $1.jpg

Links

Wikipedia.