BritishIdeas

Smooth Zooming and Panning Time Lapse

Andy — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 06:22:53 +0000

I have worked out a method to allow zooming and panning for time lapse movies. More work is still needed, but here is a short sample of storms last Saturday.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5SiCU7xk-4

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

Forest Fire Time Lapse

Andy — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 05:17:16 +0000

Here is another time lapse, this time of a five acre forest fire on the mountain range outside of Tucson. The fire is about 10 miles away. The time lapse was created using 10MP images with the camera at full 3x optical zoom. The images were then cropped to 1920 x 1080 to create a high definition movie.

The total elapsed time shown was one hour and 41 minutes, compressed into two minutes at 24 frames per second.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=CG7YV2LZzgQ

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

Motorized Panning During Time Lapses

Andy — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 23:29:51 +0000

A time lapse video can be made to look really good if the camera is panned while the picture taking happens. The result is smooth motion during the video, and there are plenty of examples of this on You Tube.

There are lots of ways to make cheap panning mechanisms, with the most popular involving an old egg timer. However these approaches have some limitations:

Once the panning starts you don’t stop it, even if you panned away from an area where something happened 10 minutes after the start
The panning is typically a linear motion – the same speed all the time
Most panning mechanisms do not have vertical panning, only horizontal

Number one comes from the limitation of having to set up the motion before starting to take the pictures. It can be difficult to anticipate in advance what might happen in the scene and once it does even if the motion was somehow changed, it would have to change slowly to avoid disrupting the video in a jarring way, missing the item of interest anyway.

Number two can be solved by using a PC or microcontroller to control the camera motion in more complex ways. However this is added time and expense for design and setup.

Number three can be solved by using two motors, one for horizontal and one for vertical. Again, unless the motion is very simple and defined in advance, a PC or microcontroller would be needed.

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

Tucson to Phoenix in Less Than Three Minutes

Andy — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 06:07:17 +0000

Another time lapse, this time of a trip I took yesterday. Created using a Canon A480 and CHDK.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vg2WYUQB4Uo

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

Storms Time Lapse

Andy — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 02:50:51 +0000

Here is another time lapse of storms building over the Santa Catalina mountains. The black specks that keep appearing are birds going to and from our bird feeders.

It was generated with 3750 pictures taken two seconds apart using CHDK.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=gk7h5ZzNqhs

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

Yorkshire Pudding Time Lapse

Andy — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 06:13:28 +0000

Here is another one -- it’s a strange angle because I needed to keep the oven light out of direct view of the camera. Total time elapsed was 20 minutes. Compressed to 33 seconds. Generated using a Canon A480 and CHDK.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKiOrLHW1fU

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

Tucson to Mount Bigelow Time Lapse

Andy — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 05:58:17 +0000

Last weekend we took a drive from Tucson to the top of Mount Bigelow, which is home to TV and radio antennas. Some stats:

Driving time -- 55 minutes
Distance -- 31 miles
Altitude gain -- 5,500 feet
Temperature drop -- 29 degrees Fahrenheit
Pictures taken -- 1,219

www.youtube.com/watch?v=iewUINHZg6Q

Some things to look for:

Overexposure in most of the frames. This is because I forgot I left the camera on ISO 800. Don’t do that.
0:24 -- cyclist
0:25 -- end of the cactus, start of the small bushes
0:29 -- fee station
0:41 -- start of large trees
0:50 -- Windy Point, a popular vista location to look down on Tucson
0:55 -- start of the pine trees
1:06 -- turn off the main road onto a dirt road
1:12 -- Forest Service truck
1:13 -- people camping
1:16 -- a family with a dog
1:18 -- looking north towards San Manuel, Ariz.

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

Manual Focus on the Canon A480

Andy — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 03:34:17 +0000

The Canon A480 doesn’t have manual focus of course, but by adding CHDK it does! At first the feature appears to be broken, so here is a short video demonstrating how it works. It’s called Subject Distance Override and to turn it on in record mode press Mode then up (ISO).

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciAV0ng1KkI

It’s amazing how Pinnacle Studio and it’s Dazzle interface can take a nice clean input and make it look like an old VHS tape…

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

The Big Dipper / Plough

Andy — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 06:05:29 +0000

A total of 105 exposures at 30 seconds each, ISO 400. Canon A480 running CHDK. No in-camera noise reduction. Four dark frames. It took just over an hour to take the pictures.

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

Google’s Walking Directions – Fail

Andy — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 16:35:29 +0000

I think Google’s software engineers needs to work on their walking directions a bit more. I was playing around and decided to see the walking route from Watford, UK to Plymouth, UK. Here is the result:

Note the warning: “Use caution – This route may be missing sidewalks or pedestrian paths”. Oh yes…

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites