A timelapse video of a friend’s garden party using my new GoPro 3. The camera was simply cable-tied to a ladder propped up against the garden fence.
The camera was set to take a photo every 10 seconds at 7MP resolution and wide angle. Generated about 8,500 photos over the ~24 hours it was left running. These were then edited down to 1440×1080 size to make into a 1080 HD video, and also the end half of the video was trimmed which just showed the garden through the next morning.
I used the GoPro iPhone app to be able to see what the camera saw over wifi, as it has no LCD screen, and was also up a ladder. This helps with getting the positioning right, and you can also fully control the camera functions from it, a great bit of software.
Because of the duration of the recording I couldn’t rely on the battery, so the camera was connected to power via USB. This meant the camera couldn’t be in it’s waterproof housing, but thankfully the weather was good for the whole two days it stayed up there!
There are some nice effects going on in the video, I particularly like the clouds (who doesn’t like timelapse clouds?) and the dawn breaking in the early morning. The exposure seems to shift a bit from frame to frame giving a flickering effect in some places, although I’m not sure what, if any, control you have over that with the GoPro. I know older versions used to fix the exposure settings based on the first shot, meaning you could have some awful videos if the first frame didn’t have ideal lighting. I think the newer versions now treat each frame independently, but maybe a half-way house of some sort would benefit. I don’t really know what I’m talking about with this stuff, so I’ll just let it do it’s thing!
The music track was added in YouTube editor, it’s one of the many free tracks you can use, and seemed to fit nicely. Also the fade out at the end was done in YouTube editor. I was rather impressed by the range of features in it, much easier than doing it in Final Cut Express and waiting for the long render times.
The time clock in the bottom left (hopefully it shows up in this embedded video) is actually YouTube annotations, overlaid onto the video, they are not part of the video itself. I found an article on ‘hacking’ the annotation editing page to allow you to edit the annotations as an XML file, rather than having to add them manually. This was essential here as the annotation is resized and positioned to that corner, no way I could do that exactly the same for each one using the drag ‘n’ drop annotation editor. Using an XML file meant a few minutes of copy/pasting and editing and I had each annotation in the exact same spot covering 30 minutes of the time lapse (7.5 second of video). Instructions and tools to help with this found here: http://stefansundin.com/blog/277