Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Time Lapse on the GoPro Hero2

The other day I set up my GoPro Hero2 to do about a three-hour time lapse series from 2:15pm to 5:15pm. There were a lot of clouds, so it was going to be nice and dramatic around sunset. The camera performed flawlessly taking one 5Mp photo-per-second, for the duration. Then I started working on it and unrecoverably crashed my software with the 9000 photos I wanted it to process. Unfortunately, I didn't compose the shot cleanly enough, as you'll see a good bit of fence within the frame; that 170-degree field of view covers a lot of real estate. Nevertheless, here's what I have to show for my efforts so far; this is only about an hour's worth of photos.


UPDATE: The finished version of the video can now be found here: A Fultondale Sky.

The GoPro Hero2 can be purchased at Amazon: GoPro HD HERO2.

3 comments:

  1. Hey Jeremy,

    Nice first attemp...much better than my first efforts. Only thing I might suggest is the size of the shots you are taking are your issue. Unless you are desperately hoping to use the shots inividually, I would suggest you consider dumbing the images down to about 1M before you bring them into your video editor.

    This will do a couple of things.

    1. allow you to take your images closer together (30 seconds instead of a minutes or 2 mintues) in terms of the memoy available/needed. This has the added benifit of making for a smoother video

    2. Reduce the processing preassure on your editing software which may be the reason it crashed. 9000*5Mp = A LOT!

    I found using Sony Vegas that at times when using large images the software would crash and often at the same place. I contacted support and they suggested cutting down the images to 1Mb jpgs. I have not had a single problem since.

    If you still need the larger images, you could batch process photos into a folders called "FINALS" (which is what I do)using Photoshop thus you can have your cake and eat it too.

    Just a couple of thoughts an good luck.

    In the URL, if you look at the title page, you will see some louds in time lapse bhind the lettering...but it is subtle.

    Mike
    mikesea at optushome.com.au

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  2. Mike, thanks for the suggestions. I'll have to look to see if any of my software can batch process like that. Otherwise I will just have to do like I did for this one eventually: make my videos using 1000 photos at a time, then splice the videos together for the finalized version. That's why I did for "A Fultondale Sky," which is the finalized version of this video. Again, thanks. JR

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