Clouds in time-lapse, Demonstration of highspeed playback.

[centreofengland]

I have just uploaded a new show, Not a typical slideshow but a demonstration of how you can use PicturesToExe as a great way of showing large high resolution time-lapse sequences.

The sequence is just clouds, Very relaxing to watch

We all take them for granted but take a closer look.

The show is :

A relaxing time-lapse sequence of Clouds.

Instructions, Download, Unzip and run the .exe.

Press ESC at any point to exit the show.

Press the LEFT mouse button to pause the show, at which point you can then use the RIGHT mouse button to step back frame at a time.

Or best still use the mouse scroll wheel to go back and forth through time.

Each frame represents 10 seconds of real time passing.

The show is made from 950 photographs, taken at 1600x1200 pixels but resized to 800x600 for this example to keep the overall filesize down.

The photographs were taken at 10 second intervals, so the show spans 2 Hours, 38 minutes of realtime.

The black specs you see every now and then are Starlings flying around.

Hope you enjoy my demonstration.

I have tested it on my 3.4GHz Pentium at 1280x1024 screen resolution and also a 1.2GHz Pentium at 1024x768 resolution.

This is strictly a demo, for those who did not think you could do such things with this great software. See my youtube section for more time-lapse videos.

Best wishes

Andy

www.derbyphotos.co.uk

www.absolutelyandy.com

www.youtube.com/comedyhunter

[jfa]

Andy, brilliant display of your time-lapse technique, nice clouds too. The power poles/towers in the bottom right corner gave a sense of scale without intruding on the sky in your sequence.

I found this quite hypnotic with the music adding to the effect also.

Well done. I will be following up your other work on youtube.

All ran fine on my system.

Win Xp SP2+

CPU Intel P4 2.27 GHz 8 kilobyte primary memory cache, 512 kilobyte secondary memory cache.

2048 Megabytes Installed Memory.

Nvidia GeForce FX5700 256 RAM

VideoMode 1280 by 960 pixels, 75 Hertz.

DirectX 9.0c

[centreofengland]

Andy, brilliant display of your time-lapse technique, nice clouds too. The power poles/towers in the bottom right corner gave a sense of scale without intruding on the sky in your sequence.

I found this quite hypnotic with the music adding to the effect also.

Well done. I will be following up your other work on youtube.

Thanks John, glad you enjoyed it. The poles in the bottom right corner are actually TV aerials, I cropped the images down to remove most of the unwanted stuff. Tip : I used Batch Process in Paint Shop Pro X and made it run a script which I recorded that crops, resizes to 800x600 and sharpens.

You can see the FULL frame view version in my youtube version of this video here...

This is about 14 hours of cloud footage!, play in fullscreen mode by clicking the icon in the bottom right corner of the player window.

As you can see I removed the bottom and left side. Some people prefer something on the ground to give scale. This was shot out of my front window and I am surrounded by houses so its not possible to have nice scenery. It would be nice to do some with mountains etc but due to the amount of time it takes to film these its out of the question.

Thanks again.

Andy

[kpnutt]

I have just uploaded a new show, Not a typical slideshow but a demonstration of how you can use PicturesToExe as a great way of showing large high resolution time-lapse sequences.

The sequence is just clouds, Very relaxing to watch

We all take them for granted but take a closer look.

The show is :

A relaxing time-lapse sequence of Clouds.

Instructions, Download, Unzip and run the .exe.

Press ESC at any point to exit the show.

Press the LEFT mouse button to pause the show, at which point you can then use the RIGHT mouse button to step back frame at a time.

Or best still use the mouse scroll wheel to go back and forth through time.

Each frame represents 10 seconds of real time passing.

The show is made from 950 photographs, taken at 1600x1200 pixels but resized to 800x600 for this example to keep the overall filesize down.

The photographs were taken at 10 second intervals, so the show spans 2 Hours, 38 minutes of realtime.

The black specs you see every now and then are Starlings flying around.

Hope you enjoy my demonstration.

I have tested it on my 3.4GHz Pentium at 1280x1024 screen resolution and also a 1.2GHz Pentium at 1024x768 resolution.

This is strictly a demo, for those who did not think you could do such things with this great software. See my youtube section for more time-lapse videos.

Best wishes

Andy

www.derbyphotos.co.uk

www.absolutelyandy.com

www.youtube.com/comedyhunter

[kpnutt]

wow great show.. very different and gives a whole new perspective on PTE

[cjdnzl]

An interesting show, as I have plans to do something similar, a sequence from pre-dawn to full sunlight of my city from a high vantage point, about 3,000 feet. I thought I would take about one shot per 30 seconds or so over about 3 hours, as an intro to a show about the town and environs.

On viewing your show on my laptop - a Pentium 1.6GHZ dual core with a gig of ram and a Geforce Go 7600 graphics card - the clouds appeared to move in a mildly jerky or stepping manner. Did you use any kind of fade transition between slides? It appeared as if there was no transition, just an abrupt change from one slide to the next, so I am curious as to how you set up the changes, and what experimentation you did to get presumably an optimum transition.

Colin

[centreofengland]

An interesting show, as I have plans to do something similar, a sequence from pre-dawn to full sunlight of my city from a high vantage point, about 3,000 feet. I thought I would take about one shot per 30 seconds or so over about 3 hours, as an intro to a show about the town and environs.

On viewing your show on my laptop - a Pentium 1.6GHZ dual core with a gig of ram and a Geforce Go 7600 graphics card - the clouds appeared to move in a mildly jerky or stepping manner. Did you use any kind of fade transition between slides? It appeared as if there was no transition, just an abrupt change from one slide to the next, so I am curious as to how you set up the changes, and what experimentation you did to get presumably an optimum transition.

Colin

Hi Colin,

The playback speed I selected for my show was such that it would work for most people. You CAN make it playback faster (and therefore smoother)

by reducing the "Display Each Slide for" value in the Main tab. In the show I uploaded it was set to 40ms which in theory should give a platback rate of 25 FPS but in reality it gives 12FPS. (This is based on my 3.4GHz Pentium Duo Core, 2Gb ram, 1280x1024 screen)

I have just tried some other values to see what it will do..

0s 10ms will playback at a rate of 21 photos per second. This seems to be the fastest it will run for me. I have set it to 1ms and it is still the same speed.

With respect to V4.48 - in the Effects tab I remove ticks from all effect and also from Enable Transition effects. Then scroll down to the bottom of the list and tick..

Quick (No Transition effect.)

Set the Display Each Slide for as follows :

0s 10ms will playback at a rate of 21 photos per second.

I worked out the playback speed using calculations. I have 950 photographs in the sequence. When I set the show time to 40ms the sequence starts the loop again after 74 seconds so 950/74=12.8FPS

With it set to 10ms it loops after 45 seconds so 950/45=21.1FPS

Of course you need to compress the photos as much as possible to reduce the amount of processor power required to stream these images to screen at this speed. So don't expect to be able to use 2056x1920 jpgs that are 1.5Mb each as its not going to be able to manage it.

I am not sure if you can do highspeed playback in PTE V5 as the last time I tried it on a beta version it was no use for this purpose.

If you need any advice on time-lapse issues let me know.

Andy

[cjdnzl]

Hi Colin,

The playback speed I selected for my show was such that it would work for most people. You CAN make it playback faster (and therefore smoother)

by reducing the "Display Each Slide for" value in the Main tab. In the show I uploaded it was set to 40ms which in theory should give a platback rate of 25 FPS but in reality it gives 12FPS. (This is based on my 3.4GHz Pentium Duo Core, 2Gb ram, 1280x1024 screen)

I have just tried some other values to see what it will do..

0s 10ms will playback at a rate of 21 photos per second. This seems to be the fastest it will run for me. I have set it to 1ms and it is still the same speed.

With respect to V4.48 - in the Effects tab I remove ticks from all effect and also from Enable Transition effects. Then scroll down to the bottom of the list and tick..

Quick (No Transition effect.)

Set the Display Each Slide for as follows :

0s 10ms will playback at a rate of 21 photos per second.

I worked out the playback speed using calculations. I have 950 photographs in the sequence. When I set the show time to 40ms the sequence starts the loop again after 74 seconds so 950/74=12.8FPS

With it set to 10ms it loops after 45 seconds so 950/45=21.1FPS

Of course you need to compress the photos as much as possible to reduce the amount of processor power required to stream these images to screen at this speed. So don't expect to be able to use 2056x1920 jpgs that are 1.5Mb each as its not going to be able to manage it.

I am not sure if you can do highspeed playback in PTE V5 as the last time I tried it on a beta version it was no use for this purpose.

If you need any advice on time-lapse issues let me know.

Andy

Ok Andy, thanks for the detailed remarks. From your figures it seems that GPU processing time is a factor here, as the show repeats on my laptop after just under 90 seconds, a bit slower than your desktop machine.

Perhaps my planned show is different in that it is static, apart from whatever clouds may be around, and I can therefore afford a slower slide rate and let the fade transition smooth out the changes. The weather here in NZ is cold and wet and heavily overcast, so I won't be doing the photography for a month or so yet.

Colin.