[Apple_John]

I am going to mount a digicam (Pentax 33wr) inside my truck to record 5 days of driving in BC Canada, Washington and Oregon. Lounge

How much frame per minutes is ideal? I hope to capture the speed of the highway, traffic in downtown, yet the video will not too boring long. I saw a couple of this kind of short video on the net. Any tips and advice?

5 hrs of real world -> 5 mins of video = 5min * 60sec * 30fps(??) = 9000 pictures -> every picture 2 SEC !!

9000?? * 640x480 lowest jpeg ~ 1Gb? of jpeg / 5 hours

[loki74]

I'm not sure what you are asking... although I can say there is really no easy way to do this. I mean, you want to manually take photos every 2 seconds? (Pentax 33wr is a still photo camera, not video right?) and then splice them all together at the standard 30 fps rate? Can you automate it to do this?

Also, 640x480 is not a standard video resolution AFAIK. You will want to take at least 720x480, or you'll end up with weird aspect ratio problems.

As for proper FPS, if you want to acieve 30p, 1/2fps (or like you said 1 every 2 sec). Your calculations are accurate.

Also, 5 hours is a very long video. I would expect at least a gig. But five mins? hmm, I dunno.

I say, buy or rent a cheap DVcam, and use about 5 DV casettes, and ramp up in your NLE. I mean, these cams can get pretty darn cheap, as long as you're not expecting it to look like film.

[k_munic]

QTpro is able just by dropping a folder of stills on it to mutate it into a .dv stream (export options)… that's the easy part of such a project…

I don't understand why you set limitation in quality, the low res and the low jpg compression? 5minutes in a cheapo quality can be veeeery long… and the quality doesn't get any better with all the conversiones (size+format)

Problem I couldn't solve is to make a still-cam "snap" every 2 seconds… ? I would do as loki said, use a dv-cam… it offers you later the option, to choose different speeds (boring parts faster, interesting parts slower), which probably keeps your audience awake a little more as far as I remember, the makers of "Koyaanisqatsi" did so…

[Apple_John]

Thanks for the reply.

The movie I am trying to make is like those in nature flim: ie, from a seed to a full grown plant at the same angle in 10-15 second.

I have a DV cam, the problem is it is a bit too big (I got it 4 years ago) to leave it in the truck alone and I am actually trying to record 5 Days of driving -> 5 x >18hr ~ 60 tapes. Tapes are quite expensive and I have no use of them all afterward. Also my aging Cube 450 may not able to handle such a huge amount of video...

The Pentax 33wr has a interval shoot function, it can program to pictures in X sec/min. It is quite small and very easy to mount it in the backseat.

Each day I like to divide 3 parts: Morning highway driving, afternoon city driving, and overnight camping. Should be 5 min max each, so 15 chapter total. The whole 5 days of driving (~2000km) should be under 1 hour.

I guess I will use different "frame rate" in different driving condition, but I am worry it will not look smooth in the finishing product.