Once again it’s that time when all the SXSW folks start pitching to anyone with a pulse their panel ideas for voting. I’m no different although I try to keep it to a minimum.
Lately SXSW has been awash is social media and marketing sessions (even my session with Chris Heuer earlier this year fell into that category). This time around, I’ve proposed a solo session on something a little different, something that I’m very passionate about and hope that it will inspire attendees like I was inspired in my first years attending SXSW when there were a lot more creative sessions that had less to do with the web, but rather helped inspire you to make the web better.
So what is it? Well, it’s a session about creating timelapse movies, which are basically still frames shown in sequence. Here’s a couple of samples:
While not directly related to the ‘interactive’ side of SXSW, they have been trying to overlap & commingle the film audience the last few years. I considered submitting this to the Film program but figure the filmmakers would already know how to make these. I’ve given a version of this presentation at Northern Voice during PhotoCamp and plan to expand it and include some new content, especially given the larger time slot. Based on the feedback I received from Northern Voice attendees, my hope is that this session will help inspire people that haven’t considered making these kinds of movies because either they didn’t know how to or didn’t think they had the right gear – both points (and more) will be covered off (short answer is that it’s easy and you can make these with just about any camera, you don’t really need special, expensive gear to do it).
Whether you’re planning on attending or not, please considering giving me a thumbs up vote for my submission, called Create Timelapse movies without a Flux Capacitor – it only takes a minute to signup if you don’t already have an account. Although it only counts for 30% of the total score as to whether it will be accepted, it’s still an important component of getting in.
Thanks and I look forward to seeing you in Austin next year!
Last week, I travelled across Western Canada with a few folks from WOMWorld/Nokia, Michael, April, and Daniel in a RV as part of a cross-Canada promotional tour for Nokia’s latest N-Series smartphone (on Rogers in Canada), the N97 Mini.
We started our trip in Vancouver, ending up in Calgary just in time for the Stampede with stops along the way in Salmon Arm, Lake Louise, Emerald Lake and Banff among other points of interest.
Unfortunately, and ironically, for a good portion of our road trip, we were in the mountains and had no cell (voice or data) reception at all. This was fine with me as it gave me a chance to explore the phone itself (being relatively new to Nokia and it’s Symbian OS) as well as take in the landscape as a passenger for a change instead of being the driver.
The N97 Mini is a slick little smartphone in a candybar style form factor that is smaller (although slightly thicker) than my iPhone 3GS. It’s been out for about six months in the US so there are plenty of reviews around. I thought I’d focus on a few things that interested me about the phone.
The Camera
With an onboard 5 megapixel camera, with autofocus and LED flash, it’s pretty capable and similar to the iPhone 4. Here’s a number of photos I took while travelling around in the RV:
I really liked the depth of field possible with this camera:
I really liked the quality of the images taken with the camera although I found it a little sluggish to use but fairly consistant to an average point and shoot camera which it could easily replace. I found the flash to be pretty decent and to work slightly better than the iPhone 4 which always seemed to suffer for ‘white eyes’ when I used it briefly.
It is also capable of shooting video (with the flash working as an always on light), although only in standard definition. It also has a front facing camera but it’s very low resolution. I never had a chance to try out the video calling features but hope to in the coming weeks while I still have the loaner phone.
Navigation with Ovi Maps
Nokia also includes built in navigation software that is pretty slick.
Three features really stood out about it beyond the standard functions you’d find in a Garmin or TomTom unit:
You can choose and download your maps to the device using desktop software so you don’t need a network connection to use it (especially useful if in a foreign country without data)
Using the Ovi Voice app, you can customize a large portion of the navigation system using your own (or anyones) voice. One of the tasks we were given on the trip was to customize the RV’s phone with our own voices so we had a lot of fun with it as it asks you to record over 50 different phrases and words that it integrates into the navigation…if the RV gets lost along the way, I think they can blame us for having too much fun with the feature.
map updates are free for the life of your phone
Another nice touch is that the N97 Mini comes with a window suction cup mount in the box which makes it even easier to use as an in-car nav system and speakerphone.
Build your own Nokia apps without coding
Nokia recently announced a web based app builder for it’s Ovi Store. Basically it allows you to make a self contained app that pulls in any rss feed you want…so I made one for this site:
It’s pretty basic but it worked pretty well and took all of 5 minutes to create an app, followed by a 24 hour approval process before showing up on the store.
A few other Likes/Dislikes
I liked:
great form factor that is very comfortable in hand and slips into a jeans pocket easily with possibly the best flipout keyboard I’ve ever used on a smartphone…small enough to be hidden well, comfortable enough that I might actually type on it…also has a satisfying click sound when folding away the keyboard
Nokia’s app store (erm, Ovi Store) has a surprisingly deep amount of apps, games and themes – many things that on Android require rooting or jailbraking on the iPhone – although I haven’t had that much time to fully explore their usefulness
true multitasking by simply press’n'hold the ‘wonky button’ (Tom’s British, you know) method for closing running apps
decent battery life…although we were using these phones constantly, they managed to last about a day with heavy use
I didn’t like:
the Symbian OS feels dated and slow compared to Android/iOS…truly feels like the Linux of the mobile world…fine if you’re into command lines but not so much if you’re into a snappy GUI
the phone got very hot while charging or using as a wifi hotspot (or both as we usually used it on the RV), thanks to the metal back plate
some of the apps were pretty pricey…Gravity, seemingly the best (if not only) Twitter client for Nokia was $10
the video mode suffered from an auto exposure strobing effect that I found annoying…I didn’t find an option to lock it in place, just switch it between a few presets
constantly being prompted to ‘go online’ or being told that what I’m about to do would incur data charges or simply being offline & having to press a button or 3 to get an update…no matter what settings I changed, I couldn’t make it stop or stay online. I just wanted to be always online like I can with Android or iPhone. Perhaps this is a holdover from the past when data plans didn’t come in 6gb blocks for less than a mortgage payment
It was a lot of fun to spend time in the RV with other mobile geeks, learning about the phone while travelling around. Tom, our host, mixed things up on a daily basis by giving us challenges to perform using the phone…including dropping us off in an empty parking lot in downtown Calgary. It was early in the morning after a late night at the Stampede then they drove away leaving us with some coordinates to use with Ovi Maps to find our way to breakfast. Fortunately it was only a few blocks to walk but a solid and fun challenge.
I made a couple of timelapse movies during the trip…here’s day one where we travel from Vancouver to Salmon Arm with a brief stop at the Othello Tunnels:
Heading Home
The RV dropped us off at the airport in Calgary and was continuing on out East with a fresh batch of mobile geeks they’d pick up along the way.
While waiting to fly home back to Vancouver, we were entertained at our gate, Stampede style (captured by the N97 Mini), much to Daniel’s chagrin:
All the photos (many taken with the N97 Mini) I took on the trip can be found in my Flickr set.
Huge thanks to my hosts, Tom Hall and Donna Suffling with WOMWorld/Nokia, Chris our awesome RV driver, and my travelmates: Michael, April, and Daniel.
On the weekend after shooting the 12×12 timelapse video, I was talking with Angela who also owns the Nikon P6000. She wanted to know how I shot the timelapse. I figured it would make a good blog post so here you go…keep in mind this is how I do it and there are many other ways/options to create these kinds of movies. I’ve made a lot of ‘test movies’ that have never seen the light of day as I experimented.
One of the reasons why I bought the P6000 was the fact that it had built in support to shoot time lapse movies. With support for large SD cards and a power adaptor, you should have no problem shooting 1000s of frames. I use a 16gb SD card in mine and can get well over 2000 frames with the settings below. The P6000 is also nice and small and easily put on a mini tripod or clamp to tuck it out of the way to make a good timelapse.
It can do this two different ways, one via the Movie mode (on the dial) and by choosing the ‘Time-Lapse Movie’ function or via the method I’m going to outline here. The benefit of using my method is that you have more control over the end result and each frame will be treated like a still photo.
You’ll need to be in something other than the auto mode…I usually use aperture priority but feel free to experiment with the settings as they can create some interesting results.
First thing you’ll want to do is setup your shot using whatever settings you’d use to capture a good still image. This includes focus, exposure, aperature, shutter, etc. Take a few test shots to make sure it works for you.
Then enter the MENU and under the SHOOTING option, choose CONTINUOUS:
Then choose INTVL TIMER SHOOTING:
Then choose your interval time:
Depending on what you’re hoping to capture, this can vary and you’ll want to experiment. Unfortunately, the P6000 can only do intervals as short as one frame every 30 seconds. I wish this went lower but it’s probably a safety measure to ensure the sensor doesn’t burn out. I almost always choose 30s. You’ll want to think about how long the end resulting video will be. In the case of the 12×12 timelapse (at the end of this post), I planned for about 5 hours of shooting (the length of the event).
You’ll also want to adjust the image quality for your timelapses:
I always set it to FINE (jpeg)…it yields great image quality without excess filesize….as I usually shoot in RAW for stills, make sure you check this before starting or you’ll fill your memory card up faster and also run into issues later when creating the movie.
I usually set the IMAGE SIZE to 1600×1200 which gives me slightly better than HD image sizes that gives me a little room for cropping/letterboxing the image frame for HD later (iMovie 09 handles this without doing anything). As the P6000 doesn’t shoot HD video natively, this is the best way to do it that I’ve found.
Hit the shutter button and get ready to wait for awhile to get a substantial amount of frames. This could be a few hours or all day. Ideally you won’t move the camera at all but if you plan it right, it can add some interesting results to the video.
Once you’ve finished shooting your timelapse, you’ll have to turn the camera off to stop it from shooting anymore or navigate to the menu and change the shooting mode from CONTINUOUS.
Creating the Movie
I’m using a Mac with Quicktime 7 to create my video but there are probably a bunch of different apps to do this on a PC or Linux. If you’re running OSX Snow Leopard, you’ll need to install Quicktime 7 from your Snow Leopard disc as it’s not installed by default (Quicktime 8 is).
Upon launching Quicktime 7, you’ll want to open an IMAGE SEQUENCE:
Point this at the folder of your memory card and choose the first image in the sequence. Quicktime will know to import the rest of the sequence. This can also be fun to do with still images to create a fun movie but that’s a topic for another post.
Another minor shortcoming of the P6000 is that time lapse sequences are limited to 200 images per folder. This means you’ll have to create multiple image sequences (depending on the length of your timelapse) and join them later in your editing software. Repeat this process for each of the folders of images, again depending on how many frames you shot.
You’ll then be prompted to choose a frame rate. Once again, this will require some experimentation depending on what you’ve shot.
Once you’ve selected the frame rate, Quicktime will build a movie from your images. This can take some time and if you used the settings I described, it may not even be very playable on your computer due to the high resolution nature of the sequence. Make sure you save the file as it doesn’t do this by default. If you have multiple sequence folders, repeat this process and name the movies accordingly.
The end result looks something like this once dropped into an editing package (in this case iMovie 09 where I added titles, music and fades):
I exported the resulting video in HD from iMovie and then uploaded it to Flickr which supports short HD movies. I’m also a fan of Vimeo and occasionally use YouTube.
Keep in mind that while I’m using the P6000 in this example, similar functions exist in other cameras and the basic concepts should apply to them all. I recently bought an intravalometer for my DSLR to accomplish the same thing with the added flexibility of other lens options….something which the P6000 is also capable of, albeit more limited.
This past weekend was the showcase exhibition and awards presentation for the 12×12 Photo Marathon that took place last December.
On Friday, the organizing committee hung just over 600 photos at the Vancouver Photo Workshops space. Judging from the feedback from the attendees on Saturday, it was well worth the effort.
The marathon winners:
I setup my Nikon P6000 above the exit in the main studio room and shot this timelapse video of the event in one of the exhibition rooms (there were 7 in total!):
Keep an eye on the marathon website for a more detailed wrapup of the event (and detailed winners list) soon. All the photos taken during the marathon have now been made public on Flickr if you’d like to see all the entries.
Thanks to everyone that came out to see the results of the first Vancouver Photo Marathon…we’ve already started talking about the next one.
