There are several ways to do Time Lapse Photography, my favorite involves using a Digital Still Camera and a controller. Once the photos are taken, I demonstrate how to to stitch the photos together into a finished movie. You could also use a Digital Video Camera with controlling software to do Time Lapse.

You will need a digital still camera, a Tripod or other alternative, And it will help if you have software within the camera menus or as a separate program in a computer to control the timing/interval. I use a Nikon D-100 (I just realized I said the wrong thing in the video / I was talking into a Canon doing a handheld self interview, oops). I purchased for my camera a Controller called the MC-36 also from Nikon. It will let me set an interval and also set delays and how many pictures up to 999 or until I stop it. This is a much better solution than I used to use. You can manually control this by pressing the shutter button or use some other remote cable, but it will be long and difficult to keep the timing even. My friend Victor has done this method and I have seen some other stop motion animations which are similar to time lapse.

My previous rig was a Laptop with Nikon Capture Control software. It had it’s benefits, like being able to see how the shots were turning out as they went and also remote control of all the camera functions such as Aperture, Shutter Speed, ISO and when should it focus. But it had a few big problems, one was hauling around a laptop and leaving it attached during the whole shoot. The battery life of the laptop could also be problematic. The other major problem was in that the camera had to download each photo down slow old USB 1.1 to the computer. This would add a lag in the sequence.

The advantages of the new rig is portability, battery life, and no lag in the sequence, it will store right to the memory card and as long as the camera buffer can keep up with the rate. I’ve tested it down to 1-fps(the quickest rate on the controller) and it did fine with fully charged batteries at Normal quality and Small picture size. If I increase the quality I would have to slow the rate.

There are many new cameras that have Time Lapse built in. The Nikon D-200 and several of the smaller Point and Shoot Nikon Cool Pix cameras and Canons. I would prefer having all the individual frames instead of having the camera stitch the movie into a .MPG for me, which is something a few new cameras might do. What the feature might be called is just Interval. Having the individual frames will allow you to choose the size of the output movie up to a very High Definition size depending on the Megapixels of the camera. Also you can select the Frame Rate: Movies are shot at 24 Frames Per Second and Video is at 29.97 FPS.

Once you transfer the images into your computer into a separate folder, you will need QuickTime Pro. Which is $29.99 for Mac OSX. Once in there you will go to file and open image sequence. Select the first image in the sequence, and the FPS. You might not be able to play back the resulting file smoothly depending on it’s size and how fast your hard drive is. Don’t worry, you now will select export quicktime movie and select the Codec. The selection will depend on what you want to do with the footage, if you are bringing it into another editor than you may want to match the quality and codec of any other footage. Now you can open and play the finished exported file.

Another route to go is with a Digital Video Camera and controlling software. I tested out Boinx Software’s iStopMotion for Mac OSX. You can try the program out with a free 1 week license on their site. It worked fairly well. I’m disappointed at the huge price jump for High Definition output. It goes from $49 for Standard Definition to $499 for HD. And the quality of the sensor in most Video camera’s can’t match a Digital SLR. But in good lighting it is fine. The program really shines for Stop Motion animation which is something I’m going to explore sometime in the future.
For Windows you could try Stop Motion Pro which is also available with a free trial.

Here are some more resources for those interested in really pro rigs.
The Mumford Time Machine
Harbortronics high end controllers

And here is a music video done with my D-100, QuickTime Pro, and Final Cut.