Timelapse Sequences

Submitted by Andrew Shanks

One of the most overlooked features of EditDV is actually a little gem of a utility that is contained on the install CD that it came on, that being MotoDV. Sure MotoDV can capture video to your hard-drive, EditDV can do that already anyway so why is MotoDV such a handy tool? It produces some of the best looking timelapse sequences you'll see on video is why. I have used it to produce a number of timelapse sunrise shots for national television broadcast over here in New Zealand (indeed some of them featured in the opening titles to our Millennium celebration show, ...being the first country to see the light of the new century we were all very caught up in the event), ...nobody could pick they had been shot on a cheap 3 chip miniDV camera, ...the results integrated great with the BetaSP footage, and the timelapses almost have a film feel about them

Okay some of you might be saying, can't I just speed my footage up and get the same effect, ...trust me when I say the quality of the final prodcut will not be as high, ...MotoDV just seems to kick butt in that department. Anyway, here are the steps to take to get great looking timelapse sequences.

• Shoot between 20 to 60 minutes of footage with the camera locked off (not moving) on a tripod (important it is steady as any jitter will detract from the effect). For a sunrise I tend to shoot about 20 minutes before and 10 minutes after the scheduled sunrise (pays to do a dummy run and know exactly where the sun will be rising, ..nothin worse than lining up on the glow of a cloudy horizon and finding the sun rises just out of frame!).
• Launch MotoDV and display the capture options (if the window is not already on screen, go to the window pulldown menu and select it there)
• Where it says Mode, use the pulldown to change it from Realtime to saying Timelapse
• Now you can enter data in the boxes, Capture, Every, and Until. the typical settings I would start off with for my sunrise would be Capture 1 frame, Every 7 seconds, Until stop, ...the beauty of this way of doing things is that if the resulting timelapse is too fast or too slow, you just tweak these settings and capture it in again (try doing that with a timelapse film camera!).
• Make sure tape is rewound and press the Play key in the controller window
• Hit the Start Timelapse button and away you go (hit stop when it gets to the end of the footage)
• Import this new DV Quicktime Movie into EditDV (or just use motoDV player) to view the finished product and see if its what you want. If its too fast or too slow, just repeat the above process.

Subjects that I have found good to timelapse so far have been sunrises, sunsets, and clouds of various types (fluffy white clouds& storm clouds are great backgrounds for graphics). The other handy thing is if you want you can capture timelapse straight from your camera, ...no need to go to tape first, I know a guy who was taking his laptop with him and doing timelapses straight from the camera onto the computer (good if you need to shoot something thats going to take a few hours or just a bit long so as it wouldn't fit on a tape).

I hope that Digital Origin will incorporate the timelapse features of MotoDV into the capture window of EditDV, ...the system also holds great promise for being able to do stop motion, since if you could replace the "grab frame after a certain time" function with "grab frame when I click the mouse or hit a key" it would allow claymation artists to set the camera up and grab a frame at a time building up their animation on the computer. Something to add to the wishlist I guess <sigh>.

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