I've been talking to a friend I shoot with about DIYing a timelapse rig. I have a hard time swallowing the $1k to $3k price tags for a 'simple' 6 ft rail, mount, timer, motors.

That said, I haven't come up with a good alternative, although I'm liking the thought of a precise lego cart.

I'd try building a rail out of two pieces of pvc pipe or something, cut in half, of a width and height that wouldn't interfere with the wheels turning yet provide a reliable track. A design (very loosely) like:

u------u

I saw a video on one unit from a company called Dynamic Perception (http://www.dynamicperception.com) that had a cool 'move and shoot' feature that I thought might be the easiest to implement on the cheap. The difference would be the camera would be controlled by its intervalometer (or an exterior one) manually synced with the car movement.

Anyway, this kind of a project is a deep well that I think can be done many ways, so I'd love to hear any ideas people have or have seen on the cheap.

Like all my DIY projects, I'll probably wind up spending more experimenting than I would have buying a proper manufactured rig. ;)

jonnyapple said:
That would be awesome to have, parke1953. It looks great.

I've been pondering motorized mounts since way back in this thread, and I'm thinking I may have a fairly inexpensive solution that involves...wait for it...Legos. I'm designing a general science course that focuses on robotics and we're going to try Lego mindstorms robot kits (~$300). I've already got a few of the kits, and with the gears included in one you can do some crazy gearing. I made one gear train that has a 50:1 ratio, which means that for every revolution of the motor you get 0.02 (1/50) of a revolution on the final gear. You'd need to spring load it or something to avoid jitters in the time lapse from backlash, but I think it would work well enough to do some pretty cool pans. You could even use it as a motorized dolly if you found a way to attach the robot to something precise like the robot in the video below then made a flat track for it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mp8Y2yjV4fU

I will of course keep you posted, but let me know if you have ideas/suggestions.

Years ago I was into R/C racing onroad/ offload,planes so my thought is put a radio in and a few servos some steering 4 wheel independent suspension all very easy to do. Not sure about the Legos. You would be limited as to where you could go with it. I like the idea.

That would be awesome to have, parke1953. It looks great.

I've been pondering motorized mounts since way back in this thread, and I'm thinking I may have a fairly inexpensive solution that involves...wait for it...Legos. I'm designing a general science course that focuses on robotics and we're going to try Lego mindstorms robot kits (~$300). I've already got a few of the kits, and with the gears included in one you can do some crazy gearing. I made one gear train that has a 50:1 ratio, which means that for every revolution of the motor you get 0.02 (1/50) of a revolution on the final gear. You'd need to spring load it or something to avoid jitters in the time lapse from backlash, but I think it would work well enough to do some pretty cool pans. You could even use it as a motorized dolly if you found a way to attach the robot to something precise like the robot in the video below then made a flat track for it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mp8Y2yjV4fU

I will of course keep you posted, but let me know if you have ideas/suggestions.

Was looking at some time lapse on the web and came across this (Dakotalapse) . Really nice. He uses a motorized dolly fron dynamicperception. Has anyone seen this or have one. It sounds like you just mount a ball head and your camera plug it in set timers and your done. It will run anyway you put it,standing up,on it's side,upside down. You can set how far it moves between each shot . Well to much to list. I think I have a problem I want one of everything or maybe two or even three.

I can't get that down to save my life...

Thanks again for the recommendation, Squamish. I found everything I need to connect to their 11-inch reflector except for a $15 part that I ordered today.

$15...not bad to be able to use a 1000mm f/4 lens. I need to find a way to connect to the 25-inch one.

jonnyapple said:
You know, I locked exposure and still ended up with some flickering for some reason (active D-lighting, maybe?). Next time I'll try letting it loose on aperture priority so that it adjusts to the changing light. The trouble is you pretty much have to shoot jpeg so you don't have loads of latitude to change exposure after the fact.

Niko, I tried to return it but was warned away by your "keep out or I'll shoot" signs.

I see. Next time you should shoot RAW. :D

You know, I locked exposure and still ended up with some flickering for some reason (active D-lighting, maybe?). Next time I'll try letting it loose on aperture priority so that it adjusts to the changing light. The trouble is you pretty much have to shoot jpeg so you don't have loads of latitude to change exposure after the fact.

Niko, I tried to return it but was warned away by your "keep out or I'll shoot" signs.

jonnyapple said:
By the way, Pete, about the Nikos intervalometer: I tried that one out and it looks like it does exactly what I want it to. Thanks for the recommendation.

I don't remember ever letting you borrow my intervalometer! It's been a year, do you think I could have it back please?

My question about exposure cropped up again in JohnnyApple's video. Notice towards the end of the video that the camera started exposing for just the sky and not the whole scene?

Is it because he locked exposure?

The thing is, I like how the sun transitions and you see more of the sky, but for longer time lapses, wouldn't you end up with a black image if you kept shooting the time lapse video?

Letting the camera change exposure would be a good idea, but I'm not sure about the transition from dusk to full darkness.

MDR, it's a phottix Nikos (a.k.a. TR-90?). It cost me $45 when I got it a year and a half ago from a hong-kong based seller on ebay. Now it looks like it's almost double that, unfortunately. Amazon has it for $67 but only with an N8 cable—that's the 10-pin connector for D200, D300, D700, etc. If you have the D90/D5100/D3100/D7000, you'd want the N10 cable.

Thanks, Squamish. I do need to ask about the telescopes. I've seen images taken with their CCD and I think my cameras could beat it if all you want is a pretty picture. It's only 0.4 MP, but it is designed for research so you can do hour-long exposures and have about 3,000 electrons of dark current (out of 100,000-electron photosite wells). I'll have to check if they've got a way to mount a Nikon.

Does anyone know of a cheap solution to do pans while doing a time lapse?

Have you ever asked if you can piggyback the telescopes, jonny?

Your time lapse turned out better than you give yourself credit for.

hmm, just curious on the price of that intervalometer. After i get my macro lens, i wanted to get a wide angle lens, a tracked dolly, and an IVmeter. The work by Terje Sørgjerd has been a major inspiration and i would love to try this out myself.

Here's a time-lapse video I shot tonight of a sunset (60x faster than normal). I probably shouldn't be putting it in a thread called "how to do it right" because I definitely made some mistakes, but I'd like to do more time-lapse at some point. I need to see if my department has a motorized mount I could use to move the camera while shooting. It seems like with two telescopes+observatories there has to be something like that around, but maybe not for personal use. :-(

Update on this thread: that Phottix Nikos intervalometer is such a beautiful thing. I was always getting so frustrated with the built-in intervalometer of the D300. The D7000's is easier to use, but nowhere near as easy to use as a dedicated remote like this. I tried to find out how to encode this directly to H.264 mpeg using FFmpeg, but eventually punted and rendered to motion jpeg then used Sony movie studio to render the final version.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfVmU5Yx3DI

Thanks, Rich.

By the way, Pete, about the Nikos intervalometer: I tried that one out and it looks like it does exactly what I want it to. Thanks for the recommendation.

jonnyapple said:
Rich, can you drag the time between shots to less than 1s or will it fit 10000 slides to, say, 4 minutes? I know I could do that in vegas, but the way I can think to do it is tedious (to say the least). I still think ffmpeg seems like a good way to go, and it's free.

Jonny, sorry this has taken a while for me to answer, I have Nero 7, the slide show is unfortunately limited to 2000 slides, as far as I know you can fit the duration to the sound track. If the "fit for duration of sound track" is set then you cannot adjust the times for the individual slides....as far as I know. I am not an expert with it, I just played around with it.
For help on using Nero for slides here is the link, it requires a download of the help files: http://www.nero.com/link.php?topic_id=7070&language=ENU

Rich.

Yeah, that's what I meant.

NSXType-R said:
I confused myself.

I do that all the time (confuse myself, I mean).

Hmm, maybe I misunderstood something myself. Keeping it in Aperture priority is what you meant right?

It should be able to do it. I just don't have an intervalometer.

I confused myself.

Well, what do you mean by consistent, NSX? You can just leave the camera in an auto exposure mode (probably A makes the most sense) and it will change based on the changing light.

Just curious, how do you keep exposure consistent when you have a sunrise or sunset and you've been shooting since it's dark?

I have always stuck with Quicktime Pro.

Its very simple to use and outputs a video file i can edit as desired.

warprints said:
Pete, what kind of effect are you trying to acheive? If you want any kind of "stop acition" look, you need a much shorter interval than 5 seconds - at 5s bikes will flash into a scene then be completely gone.

I have thought about this, and maybe what I will do is stop and start the process at different times in the 6 hours and use a faster frame rate, otherwise anything moving will be washed out

I am going to try to do a smaller local race night first

Pete

I got my hands on the trial of "Movie Edit Pro 16" and it seems to do a pretty decent job. You can set the timing to pretty much what you want. It could be worth the $90 they are asking, it may be good at editing your D-Movies from you D90, D500, D300s etc... Have fun with this project Pete, I'm going to give time-lapse another go now.

Pete, what kind of effect are you trying to acheive? If you want any kind of "stop acition" look, you need a much shorter interval than 5 seconds - at 5s bikes will flash into a scene then be completely gone.

Rich, can you drag the time between shots to less than 1s or will it fit 10000 slides to, say, 4 minutes? I know I could do that in vegas, but the way I can think to do it is tedious (to say the least). I still think ffmpeg seems like a good way to go, and it's free.