time lapse

[Phil Balsdon]

Could try iStopMotion.
I’ve used this successfully but you need to firewire out of the camera into laptop then set your frame rate and record direct to the hard drive and export as Quicktime.

Demo and samples available here; https://www.istopmotion.com/

Cinematographer, Steadicam Operator, Final Cut Pro Post Production.
https://www.steadi-onfilms.com.au/

[Mark Suszko]

I agree with much of the previous posts, esp. about using stop-motion capture. The cheap cameras fake interlometer settings and grab too many frames: you’d do better shooting normally, and speeding up the playback and perhaps introducing some strobing effects.

I did an article a while back in DV mag on different ways to do timelapse; there are clip-on intervalometers for rent for broadcast cameras, one was for betacams and was the size of a pack of cigarettes, but they aren’t too common anymore. If the resolution is not HD-critical, webcams are great for this: Axis makes a webcam that takes decent pics, has a built-in webserver, stores up a bunch of sequentially numbered jpegs then forwards them to your computer, when you just drag them into the timeline, done. This is great for long term projects like construction jobs, long as you can get power and a phone line to the camera.

But to get back to the question, I think the better tool to use is not a camcorder at all, at least not an SD camcorder. A 4 megapixel or better digital stills camera would do this way better, using less power, less accompanying gear, and giving you more resolution, which you can use to add some re-framing, panning and zooming in post if you like. Intervalometers are now pretty common in the better digital stills cams, it’s usually a menu setting.

I think it’s a Panasonic DVC pro 50 camcorder I saw, takes digital stills, lays them to the removeable flash menory card, then whan that’s full, it spins up the tape transport, lays down the grabbed frames to tape, spools down the transport and heads, then blanks the card and continues the process. You could really get a LOT of time lapse on one tape this way!

As to FCP, I’m just a beginner on it, but the latest version of the OS has an automator function on it, I wonder if it couldn’t set a chron action to call up the “Log and capture now” box in FCP, while you feed a free-running source tape or live camera feed into it. You’d probably have to treat the setup as an uncontrolled source.

It’s an interesting problem.