Video Camera
We have all seen them in a movie or a TV show, those very cool shots where they speed up time
and capture a long segment of time and condense it into a very short amount of video. My very
favorite example of this technique was an arty movie of many years ago that was called
Koyaanisqatsi. (view trailer) In that movie they had some very interesting segments where they
did time lapse effects to show driving on a bridge, flowers growing, clouds flying by and so on.
Another example is many of the TV news stations nowadays have a camera that captures the
day’s weather and then they process it down to a 20 second clip to show the clouds and weather
racing by on screen.
Well this technique is not just a tool in the hands of the movie makers or the big TV stations.
You can do this with your digital video camera gear too. I will go into two ways that you can
accomplish this effect and get some cool results for your next video project. This one is worth
playing around with in order to find the right settings to get the most dramatic effect.
Technique number one is to use the camera itself to do the time lapse recording for you. Almost
all digital video cameras have the ability to do an interval recording. What this means in a
nutshell is that you tell the camera how long you want to record for and how long in between
recordings and it will go on autopilot for you for as long as the battery lasts or the tape runs out.
This is what those cameras at the convenience store do, they record a few seconds of motion
every 30-60 seconds giving the overall view of the traffic in the store over time.
Now if you want to capture some time lapse in your digital video camera you will need to get
into your cameras menu and find Interval Recording (or in my case Int Rec, as I use a Sony PD
150 for my camera) When you select this option you will decide how long of an interval between
shots you want and how long to record each time. If you are trying to capture something that
takes a long time to occur and in which not much happens quickly you will want to set the
interval at around a minute and the record time as short as possible on your camera. An example
would be if you wanted to record a day in the life of a flower or the clouds rolling by in the sky.
Suppose however that you want to capture an event that has lots of action and occurs over a
much shorter time frame. Then you would want to shorten the interval between recordings and
increase the time of each recording. So in this case you might record every 15-30 seconds and
record up to 2-3 seconds of video each time.
I used this technique to capture an afternoon of work being done by a team of carpenters on my
house remodeling project. The result was a flurry of activity as workers raced hither and yon
nailing boards, carrying equipment and building walls. I have added it to my photo collection of
the project. (Hey I had to live through the project so I might as well have a great record of it for
posterity!)
Now suppose you have one of the great software video editing packages on your computer to
work with your digital video camera. Now you can do it in post as they say in the business. You
can record any length of video you want (subject to the limitations of your tape length) and then
import it into your editing program.
Sidebar:
I use Adobe Premiere Pro for my editing jobs, but I have also used Avid DV Express, Final Cut
Pro, and others in the non linear editing world. These are all great programs and are very
powerful products that can create some very professional looking videos. You don’t have to have
these products to create your own videos but if you are serious about digital video editing it
might be a good idea to take a look at these options.
I digitize my raw video of the scene I am doing time lapse on into my computer (big hard drive,
video eats up GB’s of space) and then import the clip into my time line. From th3e timeline you
can then select the clip with a right click. From there you will be given a menu with options
depending on the software you use. Select the option that says “duration”, “speed” or something
similar. Change the speed of the clip so that time will speed up considerably. If you have an hour
of video in the clip and want to shorten it to 2 -5 minutes then you need to increase the speed of
the clip to 3 or 4 thousand percent of normal. This will require your software to render the clip at
the higher speed and may take some time top process depending on the speed of your computer.
Once you have rendered the video clip at the new speed you will want to play it to see if the
movie flows evenly or if you will want to readjust the speed setting to make it better. Sometimes
you may want to shorten your raw video and adjust the speed