Sunday, October 21, 2012

First Attempt at Timelapse

Ever since I decided that I wanted to do a timelapse video I've had the weir dam below South Holston dam in my head as a prime video target. There's a predictable scenery change in a relatively short time frame.

I finally talked myself into buying the Triggertrap app for my iPhone and the cable required for my D90. All I needed to do was be at the weir dam when I knew that TVA would be generating. I got half of that this past Saturday afternoon when I took my youngest and went without knowing the generation schedule ... realistically to scout out a good place to take the pictures, and to practice using the Triggertrap app to do the work.

I found a nice place with a reasonable background and ran off 100 exposures. I used Lightroom v4 to do the post-processing and video generation work.  Even though there wasn't any water over the weir it was a decent run, the clouds were really rolling. Here's those 100 exposures rolled into a 5 second video:

I checked the Sunday generation schedule, saw that it was set for 1PM through 2PM Sunday, and made plans to come back in time to record a full cycle. The only bad thing was the bluebird skies, it would have been really nice if Saturday's clouds were around on Sunday, but no such luck. I had to find a different spot than Saturday else I'd be shooting into the sun. I got setup in my new spot just as the generation warning horn went off ... excellent!

What follows is 250 exposures, taken at 15 second intervals, over 50 minutes. The full video is about 25mb, which is too big to be interwebs friendly. So I ran it through Windows Movie Maker and saved it as 'Youtube' which made it about 10mb. The sky gets a bit pixelated but it's a reasonable tradeoff.



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