I didn't want to hijack the "New Toy" thread that Rich has going any more,
so I thought I would give this it's own thread. I set up my GoPro to do time
lapse, hoping to get a good video of the recent storm (blizzard), and to
learn some more about the camera and the GoPro Studio software that comes
with it. I set the camera to take 1 picture every 10 seconds and let it run for
a little over 24 hours. I was going to call the video "a day in the life of a
blizzard, but after seeing the results, I'm changing it to "24 hours of crap"! The
fault is not with the camera, but rather the camera operator. Turns out that
a blizzard with a lot of wind, doesn't show a nice slow falling of snow with
a very noticeable build up of snow, but rather snow being blown sideways
at varying speeds, and the buildup of snow on the bushes being blown off
of the bushes and then building back up again and then being blown off and
on and on and on. Not what I had in mind at all! The camera was set up to
take 7MP pictures with a narrow field of view, and it recorded 7778 jpeg
images. That used a little over 21GB worth of a 64GB card. The GoPro will
only put up to 999 images in a folder, so I wound up with 10 folders (some
having less than 999 images). I am currently using the GoPro Studio
software to try to get all of those images into one long video, and the first
thing I found out was that I need a new laptop with WAYYYYYY more
horsepower than my current one has! It's a SLOOOOOOOOOOW process to
work with that many 7MP images. Still on the vertical slope of the learning
curve, but I'm getting there. In hindsight I probably should have gone with
a time lapse of less than 500 images for a first time go thru. That way my
mistakes would not have cost me so much time. I don't believe that I'll be
uploading the completed video either, because it's just too boring. The
camera worked flawlessly though!
I had it plugged into an AC
source and mounted on a tripod, and thought that ALL images (even the ones
at night) came out fine. The only light was the street lamp outside
our house, and it was in every frame. There doesn't appear to be any lens
flare, which is a good thing. The utility lines running down the street have
the classic "bent" look that comes with a fisheye lens, but there's a box
that can be checked in GoPro Studio that says "Fisheye Reduction" which I
chose to leave unchecked. The only other thing that I didn't think about,
and which I don't like, is that the snow was blown onto the window during
the blizzard, melted on the glass, and shows up in the images. Very
distracting, but I guess that's what happens during blizzards. All in all, a
fun learning experience that I'll try some more even though the results
were a lot less than I had hoped for.
Andy
