We've all seen them in a movie or a TV series, those very cool shots in which they accelerate time and catch a long period of time and condense it into a very short amount of footage. My very favorite example of this technique was Koyaanisqatsi, an arty film of many years ago. They had some really cool scenes in that movie where they used time lapse effects to demonstrate driving on a bridge, rising flowers, flying clouds, and so forth. Another example is that many TV news outlets already have a camera that records the weather of the day and then filter it down to a 20-second clip to display on screen the clouds and weather racing.

Okay, this technique is not just a device in movie makers' or major TV stations' pockets. For your digital camera kit you can do that too. I'll go through two ways to achieve the impact and get some fun results for your next video project. To find the right settings to get the most dramatic effect, this one is worth to play around with.

The number one strategy is to use the camera itself to capture the time lapse for you. Practically all digital video cameras are capable of capturing an interval. In a nutshell, what this means is that you tell the camera how long and how long you want to record between videos, and it will go on autopilot for you for as long as the battery lasts or the tape is running out. That is what those cameras do at the convenience store, they record a few seconds of motion every 30-60 seconds providing over time the overall view of the store's traffic.

Now, if you want to catch any time lapse in your digital video camera, you'll have to go into your cameras menu and find Interval Recording (or, in my case, Int Rec, as I'm using a Sony PD 150 for my camera) if you choose this option, you'll have to determine how long you want to record between shots and how long you want to record each time. If you're trying to catch something that takes a long time to happen and doesn't happen anything quickly you 're going to want to set the interval as short as possible on your camera at about a minute and the record time. An example would be if you were to record a day in a flower's life or the clouds in the sky rolling by. Nonetheless maybe you want to catch an incident that has a lot of action and takes place in a much shorter time span. Then you'd want to shorten the recording periods and every each recording time. So you might record every 15-30 seconds in this case, and record up to 2-3 seconds of video each time.

I used this method to catch an afternoon of work being carried out on my house remodeling project by a team of carpenters. The result was a whirlwind of action as workers ran nailing boards hither and yon, bringing machinery and walls for construction. I attached it to my project photo-collection. (Hey, I had to live through the project so I could have a perfect posterity record!)

Now imagine you've got one of the great video editing software packages on your machine to work with your digital camera. Now as they say in company, you can do it in post. You can record any length of video you want (subject to your tape length limitations) and then import it into your editing system.

Check more details at https://www.timelapsepeople.com