I just happened on this by accident over the weekend.  While exploring all the goodies that shipped with my new Adobe CS3, I started playing with OnLocation, the old DVRack from Serious Magic.  I began exploring the possibilities of recording direct to disk on an upcoming talking head job I'll be doing in a few weeks.  Lo and behold I discovered that OnLocation has a built in Intervalometer, giving one the ability to record single frames in a predetermined interval.  Then, when played back at 30 fps, everything appears to move at warp speed. 

In addition to unattended time lapse, OnLocation has the ability to record Stop Motion, thereby allowing someone with creativity (and a ton of patience) to animate inanimate objects.  Think of what you can do with your kid's old GI Joe?

And lastly, for all you voyeurs out there who want to spy on your neighbors, OnLocation has the ability to record events based on the change of luminance within the viewfinder.  This way you can capture a scene without having to record anything until something changes in the scene to trigger the start of a record session.  Way cool!

EDIT:  2/12/08 - Here is my first sample of timelapse

 

Seems that we need some long vacation soon Andy and a lot more hours a day to discover all new toys :::

Here is my first sample

Andy

That was great, On Location/ DV Rack is such a good tool.

It's a shame its now packaged & cant be purchased separately.

AndyBrowne:

Here is my first sample

Andy,

Nice to meet up with you at the meeting yesterday. I wanted to tell you this in person, but didn't get the chance.

Anyway, I would like to see the intervals for each time-lapse in this video. Maybe you could put it as a title in the lower third of each segment?

I've got an intervalometer that I'm working on. It can use any camera with a VFW driver or DirectShow filter. I'm working on getting the bugs out now (it still won't work with Vista even though it should, and it's having problems with the preview the closer it gets to running at normal speed). It will be freely available for personal (non-commercial) use only! That has nothing to do with me, but is a restriction of the license for some of the 3rd party software I'm using to put this together. I expect the have the preview problems worked out shortly. I'm not sure what's going on with Vista yet.

I decided to put this together to get around the poor timelapse feature of my VX2100; I love most everything about the camera, but not this part of it! 

Dave... I would be interested is seeing your interface.  I find the one in OnLocation to be a bit cryptic.  If I had my druthers, I would design it like this...

______ Frames per __________ (o) Sec  (o) Min  (o) Hr (o) Day

 This way I can specify 1 frame a day, 3 frames every 5 minutes or any combination I can imagine.  Your thoughts.

Actually my interface may be too simplistic. The fields on the form are:

• Camera specifier (popup)
• Output filename
• Start Time
• End Time
• Interval (hh:mm:ss.nnn)
• Preview window
• Start/Stop button
  

It takes 1 frame according to the interval, starting and stopping as specified, and writes it to the file. I'm not bothering to do anything except uncompressed AVI NTSC 720x480 (I can, I just didn't bother to do it). It didn't occur to me to have it do 'n' frames each time it fired. Is this really necessary?

Right now the monitor window just shows what the camera is viewing (when it's not started),  During capture, it's supposed to show you the current time, countdown till next shot, etc., but I haven't done the text overlay yet. If I ever do; this is a hobbyist program. The interval can run from 00:00:00.5 to 23:59:59.999 (1 frame every 1/2 second to 1 frame every 24 hours). The closer I get to capturing frames in real time, the more problems I have with the capture, so that's the reason for the 1/2 second minimum time.

Occasionally I get really ambitious ideas about adding thumbnails of the past 'n' shots and switching between cameras and othe bells and whistles, but then I have a good laugh and go off to do something else. 

 

Dave,

 

I don't know if your "start/stop button" is for starting and stopping the auto, but I suggest a manual frame grab button too. That would allow claymation kind of effects where the user wants to capture a frame in no particular interval.

• Camera specifier (pop-up)
• Output filename
• Start Time
• End Time
• Interval (hh:mm:ss.nnn)
• Preview window
• Start/Stop button

It takes 1 frame according to the interval, starting and stopping as specified, and writes it to the file. I'm not bothering to do anything except uncompressed AVI NTSC 720x480 (I can, I just didn't bother to do it). It didn't occur to me to have it do 'n' frames each time it fired. Is this really necessary?

I don't see a need for the Start/End time unless you wanted to control recording in absentia.  I wasn't saying that I wanted to fire "n" frames each time it fired.  I was saying that I wanted the ability to fire "n" frames within a defined time period, where the interval definition could not be easily configured using the timer model you showed.  Example... say I want my interval to be 5 frames per second, or 7 frames per minute or 35 frames per day.  Odd yes, but very easily defined.

In addition, like OnLocation, in addition to showing the total elapsed time of the recording session, you also displayed the actual amount of real-time playback.  Say after recording 1 frame a second for the last 3 hours, I will have recorded 10,800 frames in 3 hours.  The display should reveal that my real time playback would be 6:00:00 (approx).

moodman:

I don't know if your "start/stop button" is for starting and stopping the auto, but I suggest a manual frame grab button too. That would allow claymation kind of effects where the user wants to capture a frame in no particular interval.

I need to give myself a dope slap for leaving that one out!!!! I did a lot of animation as a kid with my Super-8 (which didn't have a 1-frame button; I had to hit and release the record button real quick; which made the results somewhat jerky, but given the content of plastic dinosaurs and tanks, it was pretty funny).

I'm looking at the alternate ways of specifying the time interval between shots. Frames per second is a good one. And in considering Andy's desire to have something that displays what the results would be, and the need to figure out how to get 'n' frames to display in 'y' time, perhaps there needs to be a set of input fields giving the length of time you want to record (say 12 hours) and the length of time you want it to display (1 minute) and let it figure out the frames per second at 29.97 fps (or 30 or 25). Once I get this thing working right for me on NTSC, I'll see what I can do for PAL. And then for HDV/HD, though I'm not sure the 3rd party software I'm using will support it.

I won't be working on it this week though. It's school vacation for the kids and we're going to be running around doing stuff. 

Dave... I like your idea about letting the system perform the calculation.  What do tyou think of this concept?

nice work andy ,i thought the titles also looked realy good too

Hey Andy!

 I liked the timelaps effect.  I also posted on You Tube.  Is the advantage here that you are not using much tape?  Is it better than speeding it up in post?  Just curious since I know nothing about OnLocation.

I'm not using any tape.  Only the actual frames are recorded to HDD.  The other advantage, my only limit is HDD space.  I can set up PC and camera and let it run for a year if I want to.

Man! I like that! I got too many toys right now, and not enough time to get proficient in all of them. Might be able to squeeze in CS3 in a few months.

OK, so how doe we see the finished product.... or buy it?

Chuck

 

The video was very cool Andy,

My nNovia recorders have this feature. Maybe I should play with it some myself. :)

Chris