Drive Lapse

Drew599

Drew599

Veteran
Okay, so I finally did some time-lapse from inside my car and it turned out good. For those that don't know this was shot on the Canon 20D, which is a still shot camera. I bought a little suction cup rig so I could mount it inside the car. The camera was upsidedown so I had to flip all 813 frames into the right position. I know that this isn't DVX footage but I figure the people in this section would like it. They did last time. Enjoy.

http://599productions.com/DriveLapse.html
 
Awesome!

I own a D70 and would like to do it myself. I found the following on the net, is it similar to what you do?

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Capturing the raw images

An IBM Thinkpad T23 PC laptop running Linux Fedora Core 3 was connected to a Nikon D70 digital SLR camera via Nikon's provided USB cable. We experimented with many cameras before settling on the D70. The camera was mounted on a sturdy tripod. Using the open-source gphoto2 program as the software foundation, we authored two simple scripts in tcsh, our time-lapse "driver" script that simply calls the take-photo script over and over and over again. The cycle time is approximately 18 seconds/frame, and in that time several things happen, as described below. Each image is captured as "JPEG Fine" quality (~3 MB/photo), which yields a little over 7.5 GB of data/day. The images are then sent for daily post-processing on an Apple Macintosh PowerBook G4 laptop. Here's the take-photo script:

The computer checks its watch
If the time is outside of weekday daylight hours, it says "I don't work overtime!", sleeps for one minute then exits.
If not, it continues...
It asks the camera to take a photo, download it, and delete its local copy (so as not to fill up the 256MB CompactFlash card)
It moves the current web thumbnail to the last thumbnail (for the web rollover)
It squashes the new image to be 1/4 of its original size and makes it the current web thumbnail
It copies the local 6 Megapixel image to the web as the current high-resolution image.
Post-processing the raw images into movies

There are ~2,500 images per day, each of which is scaled down, cropped and emblazened with a date and time icon signature based on when the photo was taken. This is done in Adobe After Effects, which saves the movie as archival 30 fps MPEG-4 Best-quality movies (~200 MB). The movies are then exported as Internet-streamable MPEG-4 Medium-quality movies using Apple's Quicktime player and uploaded.

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thnx in advance for any feedback
 
Glad you guys liked it. I would have made it longer but that was the limit on the 1GB card I had in there.
 
It looks like that one thing Disjecta did for a contest a while back. Cept this is cooler imo (sorry D) cus it's actually locked down. Good work
 
I would have the shutter open for half a second and then another frame would be taken right afterwards. So I want to say that it was a frame every half second. Maybe a little longer if you factor in shutter time and all that.
 
I figured that it would be a cool freeway to do some time-lapse on because it runs right through LA and it has some nice little twists and turns in it.
 
if only i could 'drivelapse' myself at warp speed through traffic on the 110, 405, 10, 5, 105, 101, 91, etc... lol.
t :laugh:
 
Awesome awesome awesome

You and Disjecta are the eye candy mastas. I'd like to see another one except following the same car the entire time.

Bravo.
 
Ttt, if only I could get through traffic that fast then I wouldn't hate SoCal as much as I do. I can take the smog and crap like that. But put me in traffic and I'm like a caged wild animal.

Thanks for the comments John. That means a lot that you would think of my stuff in the same way you think of Disjecta's. I know that they are worlds apart but still its nice to hear.

Also just to let you guys know, I've been selling some of my time-lapse footage to people that have contacted me. I hope to sell some more because I think its cool that someone thinks that highly of my stuff that they would buy it. I'm sure I'll have some more footage soon. Also I'm going to use that suction cup rig for the DVX. That should make for some interesting shots.
 
Well that's kind of weak that this got moved to this forum. If anything it should have been moved to the photography forum because it really is photography. I can understand why it was moved in the first place. But I figured that more people would see it in the clips section. That's what I liked about the clips section before. Oh well...
 
I agree Drew - even if it was shot on a still... I mean - if I ever shot on film I would post it in the DVX grabs forum most likely - just because it seems like the film forum is more for talking about film... for showing something I'd definately post elsewhere...

Not exactly the same situation but still ...
 
It really is the same situation. I mean there should be a better way of doing this than just sticking it in the forum where people post random stuff that they found on the web. I made this and I wanted to share with the people of this site. Sticking it in the off topic stuff doesn't seem like the best way to share with people.
 
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