Gadgetory

time-lapse videos are one of those things that look super difficult to create but are actually really easy to accomplish as you see more and more views videos show up online you might be wondering how you two can join in on the fun well I'm here at TechShop in San Francisco and I've been building my own time-lapse contraption that will help you make one of these videos for less than 10 bucks here's what you'll need you'll need a GoPro camera or another camera that can do a time-lapse function crazy glue or super glue a wind up kitchen timer a quarter-inch nut which have already attached the timer with super glue some sticky putty or blue tack and your tripod of choice now our task is to attach the camera to the kitchen timer and the kitchen timer to the tripod if you have a GoPro mount it makes things really easy but if you don't here's how you do it I've already attached the quarter-inch nut to the kitchen timer so the tripod fits in perfectly and this is a standard size so a quarter-inch nut is probably what your tripod takes - now you'll take some blue tack or museum putty and we'll roll it up this is what we'll use to attach the camera to the kitchen timer so that you don't render it completely useless and if you want to cook with it later on you can alright on goes the putty and to that the GoPro let's make sure it's on there you go so the way it works is we'll wind it up and it'll rotate taking your time ops video and when it's done you'll even get a ring okay the next thing we need to do is set up the time lapse on the GoPro I'll set it up to take one photo every two seconds now in order for us to figure out how long this video will be we have to do some math we're taking one photo every two seconds that's 30 photos per minute 30 times 30 minutes that we're shooting is 900 photos now if one frame is one photo and there are 30 frames per second we'll get a 30 second video I deserve a prize for that okay our time-lapse tripod is ready to go our camera is set and the last thing we need to do is make sure this thing is level so you can use a standard leveling tool or if you want to get geeky download a leveling up I've got one here on my iPhone and you need to bring it down a little bit bring it up a little bit and it's perfectly level okay let's take this into the streets of San Francisco and shoot our time-lapse video all right our GoPro ran for 30 minutes and now it's time to make our time lapse video so I uploaded all these photos onto my computer and as you can see we've got a folder full of hundreds of photos now there is lots of software that'll let you make time-lapse video but the easiest one and the fastest honestly is QuickTime Pro so I'll open that up go to file open image sequence we'll find my folder there it is open and at this point you can decide if you want 30 frames per second or 60 frames per second at 60 frames it will be a lot smoother but you only have half the length of the video let's stick with 30 and you'll see that QuickTime has already done all of the work it actually already put the video together but let's just preview it to make sure it looks right that looks good it's a little rough but once it renders and exports it'll look a lot better so let's do that right now we're gonna file export give it a name call it time lapse and you have some options here there are a lot of settings to choose from you can really dig in here but one of the settings that you want to pay attention to is compression type make sure you're exporting as a JPEG one of the other things you might want to tweak is the quality so the higher quality the large and file will be I'll go ahead and choose high not quite best but it'll look pretty good okay okay and it'll export all right our video has exported and we've got a 30-second time lapse with a 180 degree pan ready for uploading on YouTube or even Vimeo and it's all things to our time-lapse accessory with our GoPro camera alright let's give this thing a look now how Pro does that look and now you know how cheap and easy it is to make your own time lapse accessory