Intervalo Time-Lapse

Time-lapse interval: planning frames

A time-lapse squeezes hours into seconds. You grab a frame every so often, then play the lot back at video framerate. The math is just duration × fps, so 30 seconds of footage at 30 fps means you need 900 frames in the can. How long to wait between shots comes down to how fast your subject moves. For clouds figure 4–6 s; sun and stars want 20–30 s; blooming flowers closer to 5–10 min; and construction progress might be a single frame per day across months. You can stack long exposures on top of this if you want motion blur, since each frame is its own long exposure. On the editing side, LRTimelapse handles ramping and deflicker, GoPro has a built-in time-lapse mode, and you'll likely assemble the final sequence in Adobe Premiere or DaVinci Resolve.

Applications: cityscape, nature and construction

You'll see it in cityscape promotion, where the skyline glows at golden hour or traffic streaks past at night. There's plant growth, following a seed all the way to bloom. A construction time-lapse can document months or even years of a building going up from one fixed camera. Astronomy leans on it for star trails, lunar phases and total eclipses. And plenty of tutorial videos use it to compress a long manual process down to a few seconds.

FAQ

Why does my time-lapse flicker? Usually it's the camera changing exposure from one frame to the next. Lock everything to manual exposure, or run the footage through LRTimelapse's deflicker workflow.

How many photos for a 1-minute video at 30 fps? 1800 frames. Plan your card space and battery around that number, because DSLR RAW files will fill 64 GB without much trouble.

Day-to-night transitions (holy grail)? They're doable. Nudge shutter, aperture or ISO a little between frames as the light fades, then smooth out the steps afterward in LRTimelapse or something comparable.