Hi.
Does some one in this group know if it is possible to make Time Lapse with
Canon XL-1 Video cam.?

All the best.

Hans. Denmark.
www.faunafilm.dk

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Hans:  hre are a few ideas.

What you are looking for is called an intervalometer setting, which
tells the camera to take a frame or two of footage every x number of
minutes or seconds or hours, whatever you choose.

For many if not most camcorders, even if they have this kind of
setting, the result usually is to shoot something like 10 to 20 frames
instad of a clean single one, and the resulting playback looks very
poor and not smooth. Moreover, this method puts more wear on the tape
path and heads, and runs the battery down fast.

Certain camcorders from Sony and Panasonic (don't know if Canon has
this for their camcorders but may have it for their digital stills
cams) have the ability to record real single frames to a memory card,
collect a certain number, then automatically lay all the frames to
tape, clear the memory card and repeat this over and over. This is a
superior method for smooth action.

Other methods include using the Firestore clip-on hard drive unit
which has various time lapse settings and grabs the image from your
camcorder via firewire.

You could also just shoot in real time, then use any NLE to speed up
the footage, render that out, re-import it, speed it up again, etc.
until you get the speed you want. This method wastes a lot of tape and
NLE drive space in comparison, but you keep the original footage as
archive and can go back and re-use it with different speed settings.

Old copies of premiere used to have an interval capture setting as
part of the digitizer: You play tape into the NLE program withou
remote control, and the software automatically samples the incoming Dv
stream at regular intervals, this method is economical on use of drive
space but takes lots of time to grab everything off the tapes.

A cheap program for laptops called Scenealyzer can be connected to
your firewire enabled camcorder and also be pre-set to grab at
whatever intervals you wish.

I've done a lot of time lapse projects over the past few years.

For short projects, it's easiest to just record at normal speed, then speed
it up to the desired speed using a video editor. That's the technique I
used for the sunset portion of the video on my trip report page at
www.mountain-software.com/mexico2006.htm. I compressed a little over an
hour of tape down to less than 30 seconds.

For longer projects, I connected my camcorder to my laptop via firewire,
then used Scenalyzer live to only save "X" number of frames. This works
quite well "IF" you want to leave your camcorder tied up all that time. You
usually need to remove the tape from the camcorder so it won't shut off
after 5 minutes, and you'll have to disable the "screensaver" mode.

My longest project was a time lapse of our house construction over a 21
month period. I mounted a cheap digital camera in a homemade waterproof
box, and used a free software program to take a picture every 15 minutes.
Even a 1.3 Megapixel camera has better resolution than a typical camcorder.
After deleting nighttime pictures and periods when nothing was happening, I
ended up with over 3000 pictures. I used another free program to combine
them into an AVI, then used VirtualDub to resize it to standard 720x480 DV
video. Then I was able to speed it up in a video editor as above. The 21
month period resulted in a nice 3-5 minute video.

Have fun!

Anthony

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