Time Lapse Cameras Anyone?

I've brought a time lapse camera and have found it very useful. It's small enough to be used with a suitable mount in a car to record car journeys and then have some fun playing them back at incredible speeds.

For example I recorded a car journey from West Sussex to Aberdeen recently, a journey of about 600 miles lasting almost 11 hours. Watching that in real-time would be incredibly boring, so I hit on the idea of a time lapse camera. I set it to record 3 frames per second, but the playback to 30 frames by second. The result is a remarkably smooth video scene and the journey shortened to about one hour in length. Night time footage is quite good too.

The camera is not a video camera. It simply records a series of still pictures, but when the filming is complete, the camera automatically assembles the still pictures into a video recording that can be downloaded to a computer and played back on Microsoft Media Player or similar. If you pause the film at any point, you will get a good still image instead of a blurred one that you would get with an ordinary video camera. I'm currently editing some footage using the free Microsoft Movie Maker which comes with Microsoft Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8, by adding captions.

The particular time-lapse camera that I use is a Brinno HDR Time-Lapse Camera, model TLC200 Pro. It runs off 4 AA sized batteries and will easily last a whole day if you use the camera as intensively as I've done.

It can be used for building projects as well but obviously most people would want to record at a much slower rate of recording, perhaps one frame every 5 or 30 minutes or even one frame per day, for really long term projects. The camera can do this as well, and the batteries will last much longer, up to 40 days at a time. The camera has a useful tripod screw mounting at its base making mounting on a tripod or attaching it something using a Joby Action Clamp and GorillaPod Arm. You can also buy waterproof casings for the camera too if using it outdoors. If the lens supplied with the camera (112 degrees of view) is not suitable, you can also buy interchangeable lens for it too.

This camera doesn't record sound.