When I got my new Canon EOS 40D and realised the EOS Utility software that came with it had the ability to trigger the camera to take a picture at timed intervals, the first thing that entered my head was time-lapse photography. This is a great feature of the camera, but the limitation is that it has to be tethered to a computer for it to work (unless you have the wireless module, but then you still need a computer in Wi-fi range). It does have the nice feature of allowing you to skip saving the images to flash completely and have them saved directly to a folder on your computer – this means you’re limited only by the size of your hard disk.
Canon EOS 40D
That would all be fine and dandy if my laptop were capable of lasting more than 30 minutes without being plugged in, but it’s not, so until I get a car charger for it, I’ll have to make-do.
EOS Utility Remote Shooting
To test the process and see how easy it would be to go from a series of hundreds of JPEG images from the camera to a flash video playable on my website; I decided to start with something fairly easy – the clouds from my bedroom window. I placed the camera facing out of the window with the laptop setup on the chair next to it and started taking exposures. Initially I was using a 30 second interval but I soon realised the clouds were moving way-too quickly for this.
The lowest interval the software will allow you to do is 5 seconds which is actually not as fast as I would’ve liked to get a really smooth motion in the final video. 3 seconds would have been ideal for the speed the clouds were moving at the time. I’m pretty sure the camera’s capable of it, it’ll do 6 frames in a second when you have it on continuous shoot mode and I wouldn’t have thought USB bandwidth would be too limiting, especially when it’s on the lowest picture quality settings (that’s what I’m using – it’s still as good as any HD video signal). When I get time I’ll go on the hunt for third-party software that lets you capture at shorter intervals and failing that, probably make an attempt at writing some.
I allowed the camera to capture at least a thousand images on each run, I did some quick maths to work out that 1000 frames at 30 frames a second would give me 33 seconds of video and figured that’d be enough. I did a few attempts with the camera pointed in different directions starting shortly after sunrise and continuing for approx 5 hours. This gave me a few thousand JPEG images at 1936×1288 on the lowest detail setting weighing in at around 700K each. Vista on 1gb of RAM did not cope particularly well with this but I suffered through it.
Timer Shooting Settings
The Digital Photo Professional software that also came with the camera made it easy to resize all of the images down to 768×512 in a batch. Digital Photo Professional is a little bit like Picassa or something like that; it’s a utility for browsing your images – I normally prefer to just use Vista’s built-in image browser, but the batch processing feature in Digital Photo Pro is very handy for this particular usage scenario. 768×512 is the size that I display most of the images at on my website as it fits nicely into my design so I decided to go with the same size for the video. At this size each image was a little over 100k. It’s not quite HD, but I could make an HD video from the original JPEGs if the need arises.
I used some software which I now can’t find to join all of the JPEG files from each set of exposures into a single AVI file. The software wasn’t particularly good and I’ve found something that looks slightly better that I’ll be using in future. It’s called PhotoLapse and it’s freeware. It’s simple software really, just allows you to select all of the images you want to join together, how many frames-per-second you’d like and away you go. I ended up with four videos that were worth finishing – the AVI files at 768×512 were between 1 and 2Gb each.
I then used DVDVideoSoft’s Free Video to Flash Converter to create FLV files suitable for playing in an embedded Flash player. The video->flash software lets you choose the bitrate on the output file, so you can effectively choose your output file size. After some experimentation I settled on 1600000 as the bitrate for the files that are now visible online. This produced files in the range of 8-14Mb. This allowed them to buffer and play immediately on my fairly slow broadband connection so I was happy with that. I did also create two other versions of each video at higher bit-rates but these are not currently viewable online.
Video to Flash Converter
Overall the entire conversion process took a few hours in total for all four videos on a 1.8Ghz Core 2 Duo laptop with 1Gb of RAM running Vista. If I were going to do more exposures or higher detail settings I think I’d transfer the files to my much faster desktop PC running XP with a lot more RAM before doing the conversion.
Click here to see the rest of the time-lapse videos.
I do plan to try taking some time-lapse photography at Cuckmere Haven as soon as I have a way of keeping my laptop alive.
Great many thanks for the info! Today’s a meteor shower and what better way is there to capture this event than with time-lapse?
I’ll use my Canon EOS 500D, and let you know of the results
How did it go? You’d probably want to use quite a long exposure for meteor showers – I’d go for something like a 30 second exposure with the timer set to open the shutter again as soon as each exposure finished (so you don’t miss any meteors). The problem with doing long exposures like this is that it takes a long time to build up enough of them to produce a timelapse video – to produce just one second of smooth video you ideally want at least 25 frames, and if you’re only taking one frame every 30 seconds, that means your timelapse is going to take 12 and a half minutes to produce each second of video.
hi, nice site!
i thought you may want to look at this remote control, with timer:
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/UK-Timer-Remote-Switch-CANON-450D-1000D-350D-RS-60E3_W0QQitemZ290369973039QQcmdZViewItemQQptZUK_Photography_DigitalCamAccess_RL?hash=item439b662b2f
hope it helps you!