Time lapse 2: How?

A few recommendations for time-lapse videos:

  1. Use high-definition: Your photo camera can do it, the video will be great in HD.
  2. Include some attractive central subject: Don’t just shoot clouds and skys.
  3. Make sure that there is a lot of activity: It would make no sense to speed up a boring single move from right to left (or similar).
  4. Innovate: Let’s be original, a rotting piece of food has been shot hundreds of times.

After you’ve shot a few hundreds or a few thousand images (you’d better have a big memory card, right?), you should make the video. Here is a list of software programs that you could use:

  • GBTimeLapse is able to control Canon cameras, and assemble pictures ($79, or trial version)
  • QuickTime Pro ($29.99). Just start with menu command: File>Open Image Sequence…
  • Instructions for using MPlayer can be found at the end of the “How to Create Time-Lapse Movies with a Digital Photo Camera” article.

  • Free MPlayer (available for Linux and Windows) will do it all with a couple of command line instructions (see the box at the right).
  • Flix ($10.00 for new users)
  • Older versions of Jasc Paint Shop Pro used to include a program called Animation Shop (unfortunately, Corel removed it from recent versions).
  • For the Mac (I did not try it), the most famous solution seems to be iStopMotion (from $49).

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