Friday, March 25, 2016

Digital World: Time Lapse Video using Yi Camera

Having photography as a hobby, not all photographers has interest in time lapse which is part of the photography itself. What is time lapse? Time lapse is the photographic technique of taking a sequence of frames at set intervals to record changes that take place slowly over time. When the frames are shown at normal speed the action seems much faster.

Basically, besides needs to have quite good photography knowledge, time lapse also needs patience because of the amount of time needed to taking the pictures and then compile them together into time lapse. As for the equipment itself, it will really "burn it out" with the constant capturing the images for a quite long period of time, from just hours up to days. For high quality time lapse plus for night scenery, it will take long exposure shot per frame that make it even harder work to do for the camera.

Yi Camera

Well, for just hobby purpose and for documentation purpose only which the quality not that important, the small action camera like Yi Camera, is more that enough to produce acceptable result. It small, light, and can produce time lapse video directly from the device using its latest firmware update. Initially no such video time lapse feature, so need to capture frame by frame then compile the using software, such as GoPro Studio which can be download for free, just need to make sure the file names are in sequence. But, it is become much easier after having the time lapse feature in its latest firmwares. All you need is to set the interval, which I always use 2 seconds, then just start capturing, as simple as that.

Yi Camera Video Time-Lapse feature

The quality of the video for day capture is good, but for night, not that good (noise) due to high ISO limitation. But, overall is acceptable for such device.

Whenever I am doing photography travelling, I always do video time lapse documentation of sunrise and/or sunset using this Yi Camera. Using gorilla pod is advisable because you can attach Yi Camera in any place easily, such as fences, poles, and tree branches.

Herewith some time lapses that I have produced using Yi Camera when it still need to be captured frame by frame then compiled them using GoPro Studio. 






For the complete time lapse, please go to my YouTube channel: KS TimeLapse.

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