One of the things I dabbled with in the past was timelapse movies. It turns out that it is easy to do in Lightroom. Here is a quick tutorial. About a year ago I sarted getting an error, I don't remember what but it had to do with my graphics processor and its driver. After fooling around for a while I just gave up. With the new computer I figured that things should go smoothly, and they did. In the course of messing around and reading stuff on the internet I found the problem with my old laptop. Turns out the graphics processor cannot be used for acceleration and once I unchecked that in the preferences, the old lap top worked with timelapse as well.

So I went out and took three 600 frame sequences. The first was clouds at Bay Area Park. Not too exciting, but I needed some material to work with. Then it was off to Kroger and an attempt to take series at the traffic light. In the course of doing this and also messing with them back home I learned a lot. One thing for sure, it can take a long time to process the images and the movie itself. There are optimizations to be had for sure. One thing that is interesting is that a full HD video is 1920x1080 pixels. That is only two megapixels. So I tried a lower resolution on the camera and that seemed to be fine. Next time I will experiment with even lower resolution. Another issue is how to set up metering. If you have a scene where the light isn't changing, go to manual. That doesn't work with the stoplight I was shooting because the sunshine kept coming and going and there are a lot of stops difference between the two. So I used aperture priority. Lots of parameters to deal with here both in terms of taking the time series and processing the video.

Here is what I got from my efforts today. One second interval between frames. 29.9 frames per second in the video and 1280X720 frame size.