You guys have to see this cool time lapse camera!  So wicked!  Me want!

With my new 2012 commitment to post a YouTube video every Saturday, I have been exploring options for creating time lapse videos.   I wanted the time lapse aspect for three reasons:

  • time lapse is really entertaining to watch – it’s almost like performance art
  • I paint slow … much slower than the 15 minutes YouTube gives me … so for you to ever see a full piece it has to be sped up
  • time lapse is incredibly satisfying to me … there’s something about watching yourself paint something that you know took hours and see it come to life in a few minutes.  It’s almost like some sort of vindication.  You end up feeling like, “Ya! That was me!  I took that plain white piece of paper and made a masterpiece just like that.  I am talented!” Personally, I’d like to archive a time lapse of every painting I do.  It would be like a memoir.

Anyway.  Continuing on with the story…

I did some research on how to create time lapse videos and discovered that iMovie 11 has the capability of speeding up video footage.  So, for like $20 I downloaded the new version so I could make them.

What the good folks at Apple failed to tell me is that compressing 45 minutes of video footage into 3 minutes takes 3 hours!

3 hours!!  Who has time to do that.  I’d have to set it up to run while I slept then edit from there … balh blah blah …. unacceptable anyways.

That’s when I stumbled on this BABY!

Everyday I visit a handful of websites and one of them is SwissMiss.  She always has the neatest home decore stuff on there and I’m in to that.  So imagine my surprise when I’m over there snooping around and I find a Digital Time Lapse Camera!  This thing is so cool!!

Buy the Digital Time-Lapse Camera at the Photojojo Store!

Buy the Digital Time-Lapse Camera at the Photojojo Store!

You can set the timing anyway you want … but it has enough memory to take a single photo every day for 200 days.

That doesn’t quite translate well into airbrush language, but the technical specs say it can do the following:

      • 38 hours at 1 frame every 5 seconds
      • 10.4 days at 1 frame every 1 minute
      • 13.8 days at 1 frame every 5 minutes
      • 52 days at 1 frame every 30 minutes
      • 83 days at 1 frame every hour
      • 133 days at 1 frame every 4 hours
      • 200 days at 1 frame every 24 hours

How cool would that be!  You could set it up to film an entire year of airbrush production at 30 minute intervals.  I could timelapse my whole life!  Although it would be fairly boring …. sleep, get ready, go to work, come home, paint, computer, sleep.

Here are the rest of the specs:

Just so you know, I am not affiliated with these people in anyway … I just think this product (as well as the others on their site) are AMAZING.

  • Records HD video at 1280 x 1024 resolution
  • Stores to a 2GB flash drive (included)
  • Can replace storage with a larger flash drive (max size supported is 8GB)
  • Records in AVI file format
  • Includes Windows software for grabbing video stills from movie files (not Mac compatible)
  • 6 default time-lapse settings: 1 minute, 5 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, 4 hours, 24 hours
  • Plus 1 custom setting from 5 seconds to 12 hours (Windows Only)
  • 2 lens settings: standard view and macro view
  • Water resistant plastic; safe for outdoor use
  • Standard tripod mount
  • In normal mode focal length is 20″ to infinity
  • Camera dimensions are 2”x4”x8” and weighs 1/2 lb without batteries
  • Runs on 4 AA batteries (included) that last

It’s only $150 too …. can’t beat that price!  I’ll be sending away for mine shortly …. next pay day I hope :)