Section 4.10. Time-Lapse Recording

4.10. Time-Lapse Recording

As you can see in Figure 4-13, the Camera pop-up menu in iMovie 6 harbors an intriguing new command called Time Lapse.

Time-lapse photography, of course, means sped-up video. When you play back the footage at many times normal speed, flowers seem to sprout open as though springloaded, the day-night-day sequence outside your window seems to flicker by in mere seconds, and clouds rush by as though driven by hurricane winds.

Time-lapse effects have always been available in iMovieheck, you can just highlight a clip and then use the Fast special effect over and over as necessary. But the iMovie 6 version is an improvement. For one thing, you don't have to fill your hard drive with endless hours of real-time video that you then condense into a fast-speed version; you wind up importing only a single clip that uses a fraction of the disk space. Furthermore, you don't have to wait while the Mac processes some special effect; the video is captured in real time. Finally, the new feature doesn't hold you to the one- hour limit of a videotape; it can compress hours or days.

You can use the Time Lapse feature to speed up either prerecorded video or real-time, live video. Here are the steps.

1. Hook up your camcorder or iSight to the Mac .

   If you intend to convert what's on a tape, put the camcorder into VCR or Playback mode and cue up the tape. Or, to record video live from your camcorder's "eye," put the camcorder in Camera mode and remove the tape.

   In any case, your time-lapse video will look infinitely better if the camera is on a tripod or otherwise locked down.

2. In iMovie, move the Camera/Edit switch to Camera. Then click the downpointing Camera triangle and choose Time Lapse .

   The dialog box shown in Figure 4-13 appears.

3. Turn on the checkbox, and specify how much acceleration you want .

   For example, if you tell iMovie to record only 1 frame out of every 10, the resulting video will fly by at ten times original speed. If you request 1 frame out of every 30, then each second of real time will flash by as a single frame; an hour's worth of video will play back in one minute.

4. Click OK. Click Import (or Record from iSight) to start recording. Click it againhours or days later, if you liketo stop .

   iMovie begins importing whatever the camcorder is playing or seeingbut storing only every tenth frame, or 30th frame, or whatever you requested .

When it's all over, play back the result, and marvel at the frenzied, hyper-accelerated speed of life, complete with a somewhat choppy audio track. (You don't get audio if you used an iSight or high-def camcorder, however.)