Give me a second

In my last post I showed you my first time-lapse movie. Here it is again for your convenience.



I got a new gadget! I got myself an intervalometer. This is a device that plugs into my camera and triggers the shutter at a regular interval.

I got a Pclix LT. This intervalometer lets me have the camera take shots anywhere between every 0.4 second to once every 100 hours. I'm guessing you can really set it to fire the camera every 0.1 second but no digital SLR camera can respond that quickly.

After Izzy asked how long the roast took in my first Hottop roaster video, I looked at the timestamps on the segments from that video and found that from start of the preheat to the end of the cooling was about 25 minutes. So I figured that's how long it would take to roast the batch for this video. That turned out to be very close.

I then needed to come up with a bit of music to accompany the show. It needed to be short and evoke caffeinated hyperactivity. Rimsky-Korsikov's "Flight of the Bumblebee" seemed to cover all that. My recording of it lasts a minute and 33 seconds.

I decided to make my video at 24 frames per second.  I needed 93 seconds (the length of the music) at 24 frames/second. That meant that I needed around 2200 frames. I planned on shooting around 1500 seconds of roasting (25 minutes times 60 seconds/minute).

Now, I just had to divide my 1500 seconds by 2200 frames and came up with 0.68 second per frame.

I set the intervalometer to have the camera shoot a picture every 0.7 second.

I turned on the intervalometer as the second hand approached the 12 and hit the start button on the roaster when it reached the 12. My hand makes appearances when I dumped the beans into the roaster after the preheat period and when I needed to make adjustments to the heat element and the fan. When the cooling finished and the roaster shut off I let the camera take a few more shots then turned off the intervalometer.

I used QuickTime Pro on my Windows system to paste the resulting frames together. It is easy to do. You just point at the first picture in a folder that contains numbered images that all start with common letters and it makes a QuickTime movie. A minor problem with that is the camera makes a new folder after 999 images. It turned out that I just needed to make a segment of the movie for each folder the camera made.

(I have the QuickTime Pro license on my Windows system because I started making my little videos before I got a Mac. I don't want to spend another $29 to get a Pro license for my Mac.)

I also made a short segment from five frames (at one frame per second) before I pressed the start button for the countdown.

I pasted the four segments together using iMovie on my Mac and added the title. I added the music track and had it kick in when the time-lapse part of the movie started. Amazingly, the music lasted exactly the right amount of time. Such planning!

When the roaster turned itself off, I let the camera shoot about 10 seconds longer. I was going to finish the video with a fade-out of the clock back to ticking once per second. But I wasn't paying attention to the roaster and didn't realize that the drum was coasting to a stop during those 10 seconds. So I didn't have even five seconds of a motionless roaster and a ticking clock. Drat!

So, that's how you make a time-lapse movie of your Hottop Coffee Roaster.

It might have been better if I had used uniform, studio lighting. The sun being covered up by clouds sometimes was annoying. But maybe they added to the sense of weird time.

Now I have to make movies of things like sunsets. Last night's sunset was very pretty and I tried to record it. It didn't work. It was completely washed out. I have to figure how to set the exposure better. I made a movie of the fog lifting yesterday morning. A time-lapse movie of fog is boring. (Distant fog would be interesting but this was right across the highway.) We needed to leave shortly after it burnt off so I have only a very brief bit of clouds moving across the sky. It shows potential.

I love my camera.

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