Compress all of your Events i.e. Time Lapse

Time Lapse is one of those cool things that people like to use, and I am a fan of it too. Recently, I was asked to create a time lapse for a local senior high church event that I volunteer with to which I responded with okay.

The question that followed became more about the logistics of how to create this video than the actual shooting of it. It was decided that I would use the Sr. High's Canon Vixia, instead of my DSLR, the Canon 7D.

One of the main reasons for this was because I don't have an intervalometer (an intervalometer is a device that is commonly used with a DSLR to take photos in spaced out periods of time and then are all put together to create a video time lapse. This is the common practice for when you see sunsets in film or cities light up at night). Here is the wiki link if you are wondering.

The other reason was because in order to get the shot that was required for the time lapse we would need to get the camera fifteen or twenty feet high so as the main part of the set up and event could be seen, and to be honest I didn't want to have my camera that high. This was especially because to get to that height I was forced to duct tape a tripod to the top of a ladder.

So after I set up everything, I hit record and then got off of the ladder and let it go. Four and a half hours later we had all of the video footage and then was ready to edit the video. I imported all of the video into After effects and did a simple time remap of the entire thing bringing the video down to two minutes. The export took almost two hours because of the massive compression of the video.

Also if you watch the video you will probably notice a bump in the shot. This is because someone hit the ladder and messed everything up, because the most important part about time lapse is that everything that you need to shoot needs to be stable otherwise the time lapse is destroyed.

This is a huge problem with any time lapse video because if you have a bump in the tripod then everything can go array, and because I was using a video camera instead of a DSLR, which would have shot at a higher pixel size than what is needed for video.

I hope to get this intervalometer soon and will post video of why this way of shooting is better for time lapse.