Spaced-OoooO-Out ::

Well I finally bought GoPro Hero 960. I’ve now been experimenting with shooting time lapse photography to see what sort of results we can get. Video (including the whole trip) is on YouTube; includes 5s intervals/5 frames per second and 30s intervals/3 frames per second

The 5s intervals is quite nice, but one of the “problems” with the Hero is that the resolution of the stills is fixed at 5MP. The battery life is 3.5hrs on time lapse and that generates 4Gb of data. Creates a headache trying to deal with that amount of data without a laptop. Downshifting to 30s intervals creates a much more manageable 500Mb or about 8-10Gb for the trip. So, more than enough space on a 16Gb SD card. At 30s you need to drop the frame rate and 3 fps seems about right, although it could go to 1 or 2. However DivX was finding it very difficult to create the video, probably because each frame was not really related to the last one. MJPEG is simply a “stack” of JPEGs so works well with the data we pull off the camera.

And, for those really interested (I’m not sure there are many though!), I’ve Mencoder to create the videos. These are the command lines for the two videos above:

mencoder “mf://.jpg” -mf fps=3 -o test.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=msmpeg4v2:vbitrate=1600 vqmin=3
mencoder “mf://.jpg” -mf fps=3 -o test.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mjpeg:vbitrate=1600 vqmin=3

N.B. You might need to use VLC to view the MJPEG video or alternatively just upload to YouTube which does a good job at mp4 conversion and then download them using your favourite Firefox extension for video download!!