I would like to film a Time Lapse, Is it possible to capture this in Adobe Prem Pro 2. If so how? Or does anyone know of any software where I can capture a time lapse

Thanks in advance.

Don't think time laps recording has anything to do with your software, cameras with that option record it to a minidv tape and that you can capture.

You can 'simulate' time lapse by increasing the speed of a clip, but what noa says is correct.

Great tips guys! While on the topic, I'd like to share a few experiences I've had with time lapses.

I've had good experiences with two basic ways to accomplish the final time lapse look:
a.) using your camera. my sony has a feature that automatically captures a certain amount of video (maybe, 4 seconds) every so often (say, every five minutes). This can give you a great looking effect for a very long scene, such as a sunset or construction of something.
b.) using video editing software. it's pretty easy to take an hour's worth of clouds, for example, and speed them up until you're left with 15 seconds of video. This is also the best way, in my experience, to make sure that your video is absolutely smooth, because you're not missing any portions of whatever you're filming. (using your camera to capture small intervals can result in a more "jerky" final product, especially when filming something gradual like clouds or a sunset)

Also, I've had great effects using Adobe After Effects to gain greater control over the speed of the video. Instead of just speeding up the whole clip, use keyframes to start the video at regular speed, slowly build to fast forward, and maybe slow back down to half speed... add a couple of sound effects, and you can make a very interesting 10 second clip of anything from clouds to traffic.

Hope this helps anyone using time lapse - it really is one of my favorite effects. Thanks again to everyone who contributes to this forum, it's invaluable!!
-Chad

Chad,

Great info thanks.

Just a quick question from me on the topic. How much original video capture do you need to get a good time lapse sequence? Obviously its dependent on the subject material and the duration you want the final piece to be but I wondered if there were any guideline ratios as to how many seconds of "real" footage makes up a second of good time lapse.

Thanks.

Andy

"Just a quick question from me on the topic. How much original video capture do you need to get a good time lapse sequence? Obviously its dependent on the subject material and the duration you want the final piece to be..."

I think you kind of answered your own question, and it's similar to the way I approach time lapse. Most of my time lapse tinkering has been through trial and error. You get to get an idea of how much 'activity' will take place within a given time span. A flower takes longer to open than for 50 clouds to race across the sky.

Reducing an hours worth of cloud activity to 10 seconds on a typical day may result in the clouds racing about in a mushy blur - maybe not the sort of look and feel for a peaceful bit of film.

But my reply was really just to share a personal tip:

Say you have an hours worth of footage that you wish to capture to your PC for the purposes of speeding it up. Thats a lot of hard drive space for one clip. Instead of doing this, I use time lapse at the capturing stage. I use a freeware program called WinDV to capture DV AVI fotage. It has an option whereby you can specify that it only captures every 'n'th frame from your DV tape. If you set 'n' at, say, 25, you end up importing at a rate of one frame per second. Voila! Instant time lapsed footage, no humungous AVI file sizes, no rendering required in Premiere.

It does take some practice, and a few sums, but its a godsend. If you hook a camera up to the PC in camera mode, you can even use WinDV to do timelapse capture direct into the PC, as per the original posters query.

Good luck

http://www.b-mth.fsnet.co.uk/videos/clouds_1024k.mov

This were captured with a canon powershot camera in drive mode and then stitched together in premiere 2.0, but any frame by frame accurate editing software can do it.

imo using a stills camera gives much better results than speeding up video.

__________________
Edius Pro 4 Broadcast, Edius DVX, ADVC300 -- PremPro 2.0, Matrox RT X100

I did manage to complete my time lapse. I set the camera to take still
photos in intervals of 15sec, I then used flash to put them together.

I am surprised I was not able to capture a frame of movie every 15sec in adobe premiere pro, However I did manage to complete my task it can be seen by clicking on the link below, Thanks everyone for your comments.


http://www.zen8154.zen.co.uk/firsttimelapse.wmv