r/timelapse

Clouds rolling by are often absolutely essential to landscape and object timelapses, like this one:

https://youtu.be/G1E3ciZeEuY?t=19m16s

Without clouds, it often gets boring. So, today, I tried to take it to the extreme. This is only clouds. Not even at an angle, just looking straight up.

Eh, well, I guess it makes me some sort of car sick. No need to do this twice, I guess.

New Little Big World episode from Jamaica will follow shortly. Meanwhile you can check out other miniature film here: https://www.littlebigworld.de/

experimenting with a low cost time lapse rig - Canon 50D running Magic Lantern.

Am going to a bortle 2-3 place and planning to shoot a milkyway timelapse 6:30pm-2/3am which starts an hour before sunset

Am using a canon eos 250d with its kit lens at 18mm 3.5f,
I would really love a result even close to this video:

https://youtu.be/HqV06DTSZ7A?si=PTwKwlNjnEePy4pB

Am confused about a couple of settings

I understand to use aperture priority and
set the iso cap at 6400, and auto shutterspeed,

Question #1. How would the camera know if the picture looks good since am using auto shutterspeed

Question #2. Whats the interval time i should use? Am looking for the smoothest possible results or is it better to use timelapse mode

The end results am looking for are a super smooth 15-30sec video total (even if sped up later), no star trails no ‘lag’ or ‘jumping stars’

Gear:
Canon eos 250d
Canon kit lens 18-55mm
Tripod
Interval remote (pixel pro)

I set up a camera to capture a timelapse of a deck being built. It was configured to take photos at a set cadence between 8 AM and 5 PM, Monday through Friday throughout the project.

The problem: the raw footage had a ton of dead space. The contractors would show up in the morning, work for a few hours, leave for lunch, come back later, or spend time working on something completely outside the frame. So the resulting timelapse was mostly just... nothing happening.

I started by editing manually — scrubbing through hundreds of frames, cutting out the dead parts, stitching it back together. It was painfully tedious and not something I wanted to repeat for every day of the project. I've also seen a lot of timelapses where people deal with dead space by just cranking up the playback speed, but then the interesting parts fly by too fast and you can't actually appreciate the work being done.

So I wrote a script that analyzes the frames, detects which ones have meaningful activity, and automatically cuts out the dead space. No manual editing needed — I just point it at a folder of images and it spits out a cleaned-up timelapse. The goal is to keep the pacing consistent so you can actually watch the construction happen without fast-forwarding through hours of an empty frame.

Attached is a video showing the before and after of running it through the script.

For anyone curious about the camera setup: Raspberry Pi Zero 2W with a Raspberry Pi Camera HQ and an Arducam 2.8-12mm varifocal C-mount lens.

Full 4K video is on the comments

Battery ran out lol.. but it interested me to see how they maintain balance either side of the central tower