Hello I'm Martin Dorey and you are watching Adorama TV today I'm going to be
looking at the new time-lapse video feature on GoPro's
top of the range HERO4 Black Edition Adorama TV presents Capture the Action with Martin Dorey
If you've used time-lapse before, say on a GoPro HERO3+
then you'll know that time lapse feature allows you to take a series of images at
set intervals which you can then stitch together to make a time-lapse
sequence very simple. Now the HERO3+ and previous versions took
still images; JPGs and then you had to go and put them into GoPro studio or
another bit of editing software and distitch them all together to make your sequence
things have changed things have moved on, the HERO4 now takes a series of video
stills and stitches them together in
camera to make an mp4. What this feature means is that you can check your footage
directly from your camera on your app for example. Before you had to get back
to the studio to check whether or not you're time-lapse sequence had worked so
its a bit hit and miss to be honest but now bearing in mind that this makes and MP4, you can view it
directly you can check you've got it right before you pack up your gear and move on and
that is extremely useful. Ok and as if by magic because it surely is what we've
done is we set up this camera in the corner of the studio just to get a time-lapse
shot of a setting up and we can view it straight away on the GoPro app
and there it is
time-lapse video shoots in either the super duper crispness of 4K at
16:9 aspect ratio or 2.7 K
or a 4:3 aspect ratio. Don't ask me why it does but it does.
You can also choose your shooting intervals with a choice ranging from one frame every
half second upto 1 frame every 60 seconds now getting
this right is the key to good time sequences because the number of frames
per second you shoot will determine the length of your finished time-lapse
sequence and this is where we get to the science bit when you play back your
time-lapse footage it will play it back 30 frames per second in NTSC so what
that means is that if you shoot at a rate of one frame per second, it will
take 30 seconds for you to shoot one second of action
playing back at 30 frames per second, so if you shoot 30 frames of action which
is 30 seconds it would take one second to play back makes sense!
if the action you want to capture for example the Sun going down is going to take longer than
a few minutes, say half an hour or so, then you need to work out what internal
you need to shoot at to make that sequence happen in the right amount of
time so you have to choose what screen time you need. At one frame every half a
second half an hour of shooting time is going to give you 3600 frames now when
you divide that by thirty that is going to give you a hundred and twenty seconds
of action now thats 2 minutes. Ok now that actually quite a lot of screen time two
minutes and you don't want to bore your audience so how about we do something
like, ok, once every 10 seconds now in half an hour that's gonna give you 180 frames
which translates to 6 seconds of screen time, now thats actually quite a nice
sweet and short sequence. What about something that moves really slowly like
say the tide well you're going to need to know how long it's going take from start to finish.
Now in the case of the tide it's going be six hours from low tide to high tide,
approximately. What you're going to need to do is to work out how long you want your
finish sequence of film to be and from that you can work out your frame rate.
How about we want our sequence to be thirty seconds now if we're playing back at 30 fps
we're going to need a round about nine hundred frames to fill that thirty
seconds and over a six-hour period if we shoot one frame every 30 seconds that's
going give us round about 720 frames which is about 24 seconds that's quite
good frame rate to try. If you're going to leave your GoPro camera shooting
time-lapse video for six hours you are going hit some problems and the first one is
power now GoPro say that shooting time-lapse video will use up around
about the same amount of power as shooting normal video and GoPro provide a
chart of this but what this means is that when you shoot at 4K it's going to take
a round about 50 to 55 minutes to run your battery down from full and with a
battery pack that's going to be only around about two hours and one way of getting
around this is to use an external power source which you can do. You might want
to use a USB charger on your laptop or even a USB charger in your car, if of course you can get
your car to the place where you shooting.
The other issue you're going to come up against when you're shooting time-lapse
sequences is making sure your camera is fully locked off, especially when you're
shooting sunsets, or tides or landscapes because you don't want everything moving
in camera so you're going need to put it on a tripod or with a clamp make sure it doesn't get
knocked off for over because if it does it will completely ruin your shot.
So there you go straight out of the camera, straight onto my phone
looks pretty amazing and of course if I didn't get it right
I'm not going to get another sunset but if it was something else I could at least have another go.
I'm quite pleased with that!
That's it for now but thanks for joining me Adorama TV today don't forget you can go to the
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