Mike DelGaudio

Create a “Time-Lapse” home movie with Picasa and PhotoLapse

If you have a digital camera, you can easily make a time-lapse video of just about any subject.
Using Picasa only or a combination of Picasa and a nifty little application called PhotoLapse you can create your very own movie.

If you don’t have Picasa, from Google, you should.

A time-lapse video is essentially just an assembly of a series of still images into a video file. Here is how I made a short movie of me playing with my kids in the back yard.

Here is the movie I created using this technique:

Setting up

Here is how you should set up.
- First, make sure that battery in your camera is charged up, all the way up. You may end up taking several hundred pictures. In my move I shot over 1000 pictures (and used about 700)
- Make sure your memory card is big, and empty. I use a 1 gig memory card in my camera.
- If you can set your camera to take the smallest possible pictures it can. You’re going to shrink them down anyway, so maximize the number you can fit on your card. The smallest resolution I can get on my camera is 1500×1000 which gives me 1,100 images on a one gig card.
- If you can, set your camera for continuous focus.
- If you can set it for continuous shooting or burst mode, do that too.

The idea here is to set your camera to take pictures at the fastest possible rate.

Take the pictures for your movie

All set? Good. Go take a whole heaping mess of pictures in a row.

In the video below, I just pressed the shutter button down and let the camera take pictures as fast as it could until the card was full. How fast this happens varies by camera.

Now, come back to your computer and dump all those pictures into one folder that Picasa will add to your library.

Resize all the pictures to a manageable size

Select all the photos in that folder by clicking one image in the folder, then CTRL+A to select all.

Click “File” then “Export To Folder”

Note how this is set.
- Give the folder a name like “resized”
- The “Resize to” slider is all the way to the left, making the images only 320 pixels on the long side.
You need to do this because the video is going to get big, fast. My video of 700 or so frames was 81 megabytes.

Depending on how many images you are resizing, this could take a minute.

Create the movie

Choice 1: Within Picasa (less preferable)

Picasa can assemble images into video.

Click the “Create” menu, then choose “Movie…”

In order to make it a time lapse choose click the “Delay between pictures” pull-down and select “Just Raw Frames”

Choose a movie size of “Small”

Then click “OK”

Picasa will assemble your movie.

I find that the movies created this way shoot by WAY too fast. Depending on how many pictures you take, it may work fine it may not.

Which brings us to

Option 2: PhotoLapse

Download the free application PhotoLapse

PhotoLapse is a TINY application that takes a folder full of JPGS and turns it into a movie that t a little bit more configurable than Picasa (but not as hard to learn as Adobe Premiere for that matter.)

First, use the pane on the left to locate the “resized” folder we just created with Picasa.
Click “Load Files from Current Folder”

Once the pictures have been located, you’ll want to set the Frames per second (FPS) that you TOOK the pictures at. I think it looks better if you set it a bit higher than what you actually shot at. Somewhere between 3 and 6 FPS works well for me.

Then click “Create Movie” You’ll be prompted to choose where you want the movie to reside. Just put it in the same folder as the resized pictures.

Next, you’ll need to tell what kind of Compression to use. Experiment with what you have, each computer has different compression software (called a “codec”). Or just choose “Full Frames” uncompressed.

PhotoLapse will churn away for a minute or two, and when it is complete it will open up your default video player and show you the movie.

In the next post we’ll show you how to post that movie to the popular video Sharing site Google Video.

Here is a preview of the completed Time-Lapse Movie on Google Video

[tags]Mike DelGaudio, Picasa, video, time-lapse, PhotoLapse[/tags]