Time Lapse Camera Advice
Author
Discussion

anonymous-user

Original Poster:

83 months

Monday 17th December 2012
quotequote all
I'm going to hopefully be starting my self-build in late January or early Feb and want to film the whole thing.

I've found this Camera through some googling and wondered if anyone had any experience of these camera or anything else they might feel is a better option.

I'll be mounting the camera on a pole so it needs to be weather tight.

Thanks
Gary

MagicalTrevor

6,481 posts

258 months

Monday 17th December 2012
quotequote all
I couldn't see how long the battery lasts on that camera but just as an alternative...

Have you considered a GoPro camera instead? Purely from the point of view that you could then use it for other stuff? It'd cost you £250 ish but then you could use it in your car, timelapse trips abroad or any number of things. You'd need to power a GoPro throughout the day mind but I just thought I'd throw that in the mix.

Looks like a great toy though biggrin

anonymous-user

Original Poster:

83 months

Monday 17th December 2012
quotequote all
The thing about the one I listed is it's battery power. As the site is only 200 yards from where I'm renting it will be easy to change the batteries every couple of days. Mains power would be a little difficult I think.


GoPro a great piece of kit though!

shtu

4,510 posts

175 months

Monday 17th December 2012
quotequote all
For the money, s'alright I guess.

However, if you want this as a permanent record of the work, I'd be thinking more in terms of a good quality IP camera, which can direct-post the images to some sort of online storage like Flickr - otherwise you'll be forever faffing about swapping memory cards and stuff at the top of a ladder.

I've used Panasonic IP cameras for similar purposes before, using the inbuilt email-out feature to send the images straight to Flickr, but most of the half-decent ones can do this, eg, Axis or YCam are also relatively cheap, popular units.

It also means you can use the cameras for security as well, as they can then also ahow the live images to you via t'internet.

Once you have the individual images, there's plenty software out there will let you create a time-lapse from them.

Colin RedGriff

2,541 posts

286 months

Monday 17th December 2012
quotequote all
Don't know the camera at all I'm afraid. The reviews seem variable so it's difficult to tell. There is reference to some proprietary software so it depends if this works for you or not.

I bought one of these http://www.wingscapes.com/timelapse-cameras/timela... for an extension build we had done which worked well.

Some tips I can pass on
Try it out before your build starts so you know how to set it up.
Select the location of your camera, think about the path of the sun so that you try to avoid lots of sun glare.
If you are going to to be changing batteries/memory cards, can you do that without disturbing the position
If you have to move the camera Can you accurately replace it in the same place

Not sure how the camera you bought works, it seems to imply that It will generate the time lapse films automatically, if it does what format are they in and wil you need to convert them to a format to view them later on?
If not do you have some software to do the conversion?
You are going to have a ton of photos to convert and it will take a while to process them into a video.

anonymous-user

Original Poster:

83 months

Monday 17th December 2012
quotequote all
Cheers guys - I'll look into these.

shtu

4,510 posts

175 months

Monday 17th December 2012
quotequote all
Cool.

The feature you are looking for (to do it the way I did) is for the camera to be able to email images on a schedule, rahter than just on motion-detect. That keeps it all pretty self-contained, ie, you don't need to mess about having a PC switched on all the time (unless you want to - mine also FTP images to a server onsite), no messing about with memory cards, etc.

You could then either email them to your own address, or most of the online image-gallery outfits have some sort of email-to or FTP-to facility available, though it's often not that well publicised.

If you want to test out the idea for £cheap, have a look at something like this, which claims to have a scheduling option, http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Official-Tenvis-WATERPRO...