I have been interested in time lapse movies for a long time. By changing the time scales at which we perceive things, we get new insights into events happening around us.
The oldest time lapse movie below was taken with an 8mm movie camera that had a time lapse feature. Alas, it was stolen by someone who probably had no idea how hard it was to find a consumer camera with that feature.
More recent efforts came from simple video cameras. The entire video is fed into a computer, and then most frames are thrown away to make the time lapse. For many of these, this involved an SGI Irix machine and custom software.
The most recent efforts use the Hero video camera, a lovely 1080p device with 32GB Type 4 SD card and about a two-hour battery. This has inspired the rash of recent entries.
My ideal time lapse visualization would be of a mountain range eroding into a plain. Alas, we lack the longevity for collecting the data over geological time scales. But one might be able to create a geologically-plausible erosion movie of one of those fractal mountain ranges we see in movies these days.
Here is a list of our time lapse movies, with the newest at the top. The dates for many of the old ones are approximate. Other fragments and tests are available here.
| Description | X | MB | Fmt. | Type | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Across the Rockies at Mach 20 | 20 | 499 | 720p | .mov | 9 August 2011 |
| Leaving the Adirondacks | 20 | 303 | 720p | .mov | 20 June 2011 |
| A surprisingly weird iChat | 20 | 66 | 720p | .mov | 25 June 2011 |
| Ellivsdranreb | -5, -12 | 149 | 720p | .mov | 27 March 2011 |
| I pushed a few driving rules for this, but was never unsafe. | |||||
| An Evening of Fast Solitaire | 20 | 361 | 720p | .mov | 22 March 2011 |
| Key West to the mainland | 20 | 642 | 720p | .mov | 20 March 2011 |
| My morning commute, in a slot car | 20 | 100 | 720p | .mov | 10 March 2011 |
These will be cataloged shortly: