[Closed] Best way to do a time lapse of a construction project.

I had a 5 month project and we got a camera rented on a gert big pole. Took a photo every 15 or 30 minutes during daylight hours and gave us a great marketing video. If doing this yourself I think I'd want a photo more often than once a week as the video would be way too quick.

Got this in my work spam the other day too, so might be worth a look if you can get the budget - http://www.brinnouk.co.uk/

One a week wont' be any good. At the usual 30fps that only makes one second of footage!

One an hour would be more like it, or one every half hour if you're going to cut out the nights. If I were you I'd get an old mobile phone with no sim, connect to your home wifi and download a timelapse app, then set it up in an adjacent spot plugged in so it'll keep going for the whole time.

Might not be at his home nor have access to wifi.

Then again it might be

No its a huge warehouse. Just about got the bases in. So if I did it once a day that would be better? Because it's such a big site the subtle changes of once an hour will hardly be noticed. I take it its gotta be exactly the same spot each day.

Trust me, once a day won't be enough. Each change will be subtle yes, but remember you're going to be putting 30 of these pictures in each second of the resulting movie, so you need small changes.

Otherwise it's a slideshow not a timelapse movie. And yes it will need to be the exact same spot - unless perhaps you use that new microsoft app..?

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I don't know if I have the time for more than once a day. That'll be the sort of shot.

Well, work it out then wrightyson.

How long do you want the final time lapse to be? You'll only be on site actually doing anything for say, 8-10 hours a day. As mol says, the time-lapse movie will be running at 30fps. So for each minute of movie, you'll need 1800 shots. One per hour, in a working day is, say, 8 shots. In a week, that's 40. You'll have one minute and a bit-ish of footage after a year on site. Every half hour for a year will give you two minutes. Etc etc.

Could use my gopro but don't fancy leaving it set up at work everyday. It will inevitably go "missing" if I stick it up on a pole somewhere. Needs more thought, would it be a waste of te to take one shot a day? Would that look rubbish cobbled together? Thanks for the input Molgrips.

I've made a few time lapse films. As mentioned above you want a lot of shots if you can. Makes it much easier to turn it into a film. You can always delete frames but you can't create then. Over that time you'll struggle with a battery powered camera so you need either a mains supply or use a battery camera but be disciplined in swapping the battery. Lots of cheap cameras with time lapse now. Buy one, set the interval and stick it on a pole nicely out the way. Then just check on it/charge it every so often without moving it. Maybe a cheap go pro copy with an external usb battery charging it and just keep swapping/charging the external battery.

Don't go about it half cocked like I attempted.

CCTV camera onto DVR. To be fair this was around 15 years ago.

I had a call with one of our contractors today about site security and as a bonus the company who supplied site security (inc CCTV) gave them a time lapse video taken from the temp security cameras!

There are plenty of decent guides online about how to automate the Raspberry Pi & Pi Camera to do timelapses, means you can leave it in place (£30 rather than leaving a proper camera/gopro etc.).

One other thing to consider. You might want to position the camera on the South side of the site facing North so that you don't get too much glare from the sun.

From experience cctv camera still give a poor output quality. Crap in will equal crap out. Some small camera mounted securely and powered reliably is perfect, but not easy if I'm honest if you were building it yourself. Is there a building with a window overlooking the site?

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B-fahKdcRyD9X1V4M282ajZTdzQ

this was taken on the local train line.. i cant remember how many photos, maybe 1 every 5 mins.

Get my mate to do it, he does it for a living. Its more tricky than you think. Power, weather, thief, type of files produced, storage of files.Power is your biggest problem.

Check out Brinno cameras.

Much, much smaller scale and done over days, not weeks, but here's one of mine from a few years back, making an outdoor bench with one of my students (who's turned out to be a supremely talented young bloke, and sickeningly nice with it.)

As said, if you want a traditional time lapse you need to take at least ~30 images a day to make it comprehensible to the audience, any less and you will need to pause the photo on screen for a detectable amount of time and it will look like a slide show, not a time lapse. An alternative if you can't set up an automated system would be to film ~1 sec intervals each day from the same spot, or moving around the site, preferably at the same time of day or with a planned progression of shadows across the site over the duration of the build.

We've got a new sports hall being built at work. A year and a half project and we've got the camera setup to take a picture every 15 minutes.

Urban croft films can do this. And make you a film if you want.

www.urbancroft.co.uk

I became briefly addicted to the Network Rail YouTube channel a while back (I'm that kind of guy) as they have loads of quite impressive time lapse videos of construction projects. They have quite a few mentions of the company they use to do them.

I'm using my old slr digital camera, mounted on a tripod with ac power battery and a canon timer. Granted much smaller project - truck rebuild.