Time lapse movie: an hour in a child’s day

20120530-185543.jpgAfter exchanging the Contour+ camera for the new GoPro HD Hero 2 (the push-button interface of the Contour+ was just too inconvenient), I set up a test, again using my daughter as a model. She was hanging out with her toys, while my wife and I did some housework. I aimed the camera at the baby and let it roll for an hour, taking a still picture every 1 sec. The camera was set to “wide” (170 deg field of view), and the image resolution corresponded to 5 megapixel sensor size.

To assemble the images into a movie, I created a new iPhoto library on my MacBook Pro and imported all pictures into it (about 3000 files altogether). After that, in iMovie, I imported the stills into a new project, setting the mode to “Fit”, disabling the default Ken Burns effect, and setting the duration of each still image to 0.1 sec.

The entire clip was initially 6.5 minutes-long, and I edited it down to about 3.5 minutes. I wanted to keep the final clip as short as possible, but found it very difficult to cut it down – as a parent, I find my daughter’s every smile and gesture adorable and just cannot get rid of the otherwise rather boring footage.

The result is this clip:


Note that the image above was not taken with the GoPro. It was shot with a Canon 5D Mark II with a 24-105 mm lens.