Time lapse recording

farss wrote on 12/20/2003, 2:59 PM

Potential client has a new process for making bricks and wants to shoot a time lapse of a house being built using them over a six week period. Just to make it interesting it's being built in the middle of nowhere so probably the whole recording rig needs to run off solar power.
Everything I've found so far fro time lapse seems to be aimed at the security industry. Mostly their gear is fairly low res and not really suitable. Before I start looking at building my own rig, or maybe a few of them to get multiple angles, anyone know of commercial gear that'll do this. Bear in mind this'll have to be an unmanned install, theft could be an issue, guess I could get them to build an enclosure.

Comments

johnmeyer wrote on 12/20/2003, 5:46 PM

You can use SCLive on a laptop directly connected, via Firewire, to a camera. The laptop would have to be near the camera.

farss wrote on 12/20/2003, 5:59 PM

John,
reading through their specs I can do it from a prerecoded tape, recording 6 weeks onto tape is not what I had in mind! Maybe you know more about their product than they're describing on their web site?

johnmeyer wrote on 12/20/2003, 11:48 PM

recording 6 weeks onto tape is not what I had in mind

It's not what I had in mind either.

SCLive (Scenalyzer Live) records from you camera directly to your computer. In time lapse mode, it only records one out of every "n" frames. If you want to make a one minute tape from a six week project, you would set "n" to a very large number (let's see: 60 min x 24 hrs x 42 days = 60,480 minues, so "n" would be 60,480). Thus, you only capture one out of every 60,480 frames.

farss wrote on 12/21/2003, 1:51 AM

John,
thanks! I kind of thought that'd be the answer, they just didn't seem to promote / explain that on the sight. I think also Premiere has that facility built in and it looks like the Firestore will record a frame via an external contact closure. I've got access to one of those that's never used so we might be able to get some milage out of it.

I could easily build a rig that drives a video switch to do say a 4 camera time lapse recording. Sorting out 100,000 or so stills wouldn't be that hard either given the way the Firestore names them. Powering the whole kit and stopping it getting stolen might be the hardest part after all. That and things like keeping the lenses clean in a dusty environment.