Revision as of 22:05, 16 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 at one image every second was so successful—although with cuts, irregularities and poor image resolution—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 and its faster version, our second timelapse of the Plaza Mayor, this time at a reduced repetition rate (one image every 10 seconds) but for 17 hours, with the sounds and rythms of Zyryab from Paco de Lucía and his sextet.

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 at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.
• 6am, sunrise over las Cuatro Torres de Madrid from his flat.

Over time-lapses of interest

Of Madrid

There are mind-boggling timelapses of Madrid.

• Luis Caldevilla is a reference in timelapsing, and released various outstanding works on Madrid.
• Madrid. Timelapse. A timelapse of Professional quality and gives an overview of many important locations.
• Un día en Gran Vía, a nice tribute to this major axis of the capital, with a nice match to the soundtrack.
• Madrid desde el aire, a great compilation of various places, by Ryan San. The Author comments "Agradezco desde aqui a todos los porteros que no me han dejado subir a los respectivos áticos y comentarles que abran bien los ojos porque volveré."
• Paco Castilla released timelapses of Madrid's big sky (see also here) with interesting patterns of creation/vanishing of clouds.
• Bringing it to the next level: Hyperlapse through Madrid 2013 (pithy it's so short, but one can imagine the unbelievable amount of work). Note the dolly zoom on the Fallen Angel!

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

See also

• Koyaanisqatsi, a combination of slow-mo & time-lapses with music by Philip Glass.

Links

• Wikipedia.