This is very easy to do. Take any laptop and install Scenalyzer. It has timelapse capture built in. It lets you capture one out of every "n" frames and store the result directly into an AVI file.

My understanding with Scenalyzer is that you would have to film for the whole two weeks and then capture from the tapes. This would mean being in attendance to change tapes all the time and an awful lot of time spent capturing the footage.

An alternative solution would be to use frame capture from a live feed, as I use for stop motion. There is a free frame capture program called 'monkeyjam' (www.giantscreamingrobotmonkeys.com) which has facilities for time lapse capture, via Firewire direct to a PC/laptop, i.e. there is no tape involved, the frames are recorded directly to the hard disk, and then compiled into an avi by monkeyjam on completion.

Just make sure you...

... have no tape in your camera, so it doesn't hibernate

...set up the camera on full manual control so you don't get lots of flickering due to changing automatic settings

...have plenty of space on your HD for all the frames

...the PC/laptop to not hibernate or invoke any other unwanted processes for the period of capture

...carry out a few tests to see what sort of time interval you want, so that the finished film looks effective

...watch out for the placement of the camera, e.g. over two weeks, the position of the sun will change, vehicles may obscure your view, etc.

Good luck with this one, it sounds fascinating and I would love to see the outcome.

I actually did this when I had a pool built. But instead of using my video camera, I used my digital still camera set to snap a shot every minute, then sucked all the frames into Vegas. I played with the import lengths of the images to get the speed that I wanted on the playback and then rendered. Since the resolution of my camera was more than the normal resolution of the video camera, the quality was very good. I also had my power adapter hooked up to the camera so I didn't have to worry about the batteries.


Just another way of doing it.

My understanding with Scenalyzer is that you would have to film for the whole two weeks and then capture from the tapes.

No, that is not correct.

With Scenalyzer, what you do is hook your camera up to the laptop. Do not put tape in the camera. The video is captured directly to the hard disk of the laptop, one frame out of every "n" frames that the camera sees. You can leave the whole thing completely unattended for weeks (or months) at a time. Obviously you need power backup (UPS) if you want to ensure your taping continues, even with power interruptions.

You definitely do not want to use tape for a time lapse capture, because almost all such captures actually capture more than one frame each time, and put a strain on the camera (all that starting a stopping). However, if that doesn't bother you, and you have a camera that does this sort of time lapse capture, I wrote a script to take these one second captures and extract a single frame from each, so you can still go this route, if you want. The script is over at the VASST site.

I use a Canon A95 and you can controll it entirely and do timelapse capture via the included software and USB link.