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We’ve been having lots of brief thunder storms in Brighton over the last couple of days. Often only lasting half an hour, many of them have bought lots of thunder and lightning and heavy showers of rain. Annoyingly, one such storm took out my neighbourhood’s electricity for about 4 hours while I was in the middle of writing this blog entry. Anyway, earlier today when one of these storms started to blow in at sunrise I decided to have a go at doing another time-lapse.

I would expect this to work on any Canon camera that supports live-view and remote shooting, this includes: 1Ds Mk III, 1D Mk III, 5D Mk II, 50D, 20Da (maybe), 450D, 500D and 1000D. The workflow I’m using to produce time-lapse videos from my Canon EOS 40D is as follows:

1. Capture a series of images at 1936×1288 using the timer function in the remote shooting part of the EOS Utility.
2. Batch resize them to 768×512 using Digital Photo Professional.
3. Combine the set into an uncompressed AVI file using Photolapse.
4. Encode the AVI file to Flash FLV using Free Video to Flash converter
5. Encode the AVI file with Xvid using Virtualdub and GKnot’s codec pack.
6. Upload both files and embed a Flash player for the FLV and link directly to the AVI file.

I’ve done some more screenshots throughout the process to add to my last blog entry where I introduced it and illustrate a bit better how it works. The first screenshot is of the batch settings screen in Canon’s Digital Photo Professional software. Note I had to untick the ‘Lock aspect ratio’ checkbox because it computes the correct height value for a width of 768 to be 511. The only way to force it to produce images at 768×512 is to untick this box. I left the default option of using a new set of filenames for the resized versions – I like to keep the high-res versions as well.

Digital Photo Pro batch settings

Below you see the actual batch process being executed. It’s fairly quick for 2000 images, less than 10 minutes total time to resize them all.

Batch resize in Photo Pro

The next step is to combine all of the individual smaller images created from the batch process into a single AVI file. Photolapse will actually allow you to perform encoding on the output file, but I choose to create an uncompressed AVI to start with. The drawback of this seems to be that Photolapse (the version I’m using at least) doesn’t create an index on an uncompressed AVI. This didn’t seem to cause a problem – the Flash conversion doesn’t even mention it and Virtualdub rebuilt the index on the file as soon as I opened it. However, it does mean you can’t play the AVI file in Media Player until you have rebuilt that index.

Photolapse AVI creation from JPEGs

Here’s a screenshot of the conversion to FLV – I prefer to do this directly from an uncompressed AVI because transcoding is bad.

AVI to Flash (FLV) conversion

And here’s a screenshot of the XVid encoding in Virtualdub. You need to install the GKnot codec pack in order to get the option of outputting XVid or DivX encoded videos in Virtualdub, but once you have that it works brilliantly.

Virtualdub Xvid encoding

And here’s the final result – an embedded Flash video player and a link to a higher quality Xvid encoded AVI:

Download ‘Sunrise and storm clouds’ as a high-quality Xvid encoded AVI file.

Click here to see the rest of the time-lapse videos.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 7th, 2009 at 7:31 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.