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Time Lapse W/out a computer
Hi Folks,
I am about to embark on a timelapse adventure, and I need guidance. I have read recent posts of people doing time lapse using a digital still camera and a laptop. But what if you are going to be somewhere where you wouldn’t want to bring a laptop? (a very remote contruction site). Plus, I don’t have one available for the shoot.
I am shooting footage of a building going up through the winter months in New Hampshire. 3 month building schedule, remote location, possible AC power.
Since the final product is going to DV, I would PREFER to use a still camera (for the higher resolution) but certainly could use a MiniDV camera. The one caveat is that whatever I use has to be a self enclosed unit, with possibly an extension cord for power. I could get out to change tapes and batteries occasionally, but obviously would prefer not to. This will also be on a construction site, so I need to buy a camera that will not make me cry when a bulldozer knocks it over
That said, my questions are these:
1) What is the cheapest DV camera that has “interval recording”?
2) What digital Still cameras offer internal or on-board intervalometers, or some sort of time lapse setting?
3) What is the cheapest intervalometer for digital still or MiniDV cameras that you guys can think of?
It’s like a contest. Who can come up with the cheapest rig for this setup? The winner will get my eternal gratitude. Which, granted, probably isn’t worth all that much.
Allen Baldwin
Catama Productions
South Portland, Maine -
1 Reply
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Just ran across your post and saw that you got no responses. This is probably too late, but by far the cheapest option for good time lapse is the Pentax W10 (now W20 I believe) with a 2GB SD card you can take up to about 1,000 frames at 3MP plus and set the interval to any time period from 10 sec to 99 minutes. The camera goes to “sleep” between frames and I have been able to take 500 plus frames with just the on-board battery. Plus it’s waterproof so rain and fog won’t damage the camera (although they may obscure a few frames). Assemble the shots with QT Pro at any size, aspect ratio and frame rate you want.
Amazing for a pocket camera at $300. There may be others as well, this is just one I’m familiar with. You’ll need to force off the flash and there may be other tweaks you’ll want to make with the exposures, but I got good results just letting the camera pick the exposures.
Rob Ikenberry
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