Cheswick time-lapse movies

I have been interested in time lapse movies for a long time. By changing the time scales at which we perceive things, we get new insights into events happening around us.

The oldest time lapse movie below was taken with an 8mm movie camera that had a time lapse feature. Alas, it was stolen by someone who probably had no idea how hard it was to find a consumer camera with that feature.

More recent efforts came from simple video cameras. The entire video is fed into a computer, and then most frames are thrown away to make the time lapse. For many of these, this involved an SGI Irix machine and custom software.

The most recent efforts use the Hero video camera, a lovely 1080p device with 32GB Type 4 SD card and about a two-hour battery. This has inspired the rash of recent entries.

My ideal time lapse visualization would be of a mountain range eroding into a plain. Alas, we lack the longevity for collecting the data over geological time scales. But one might be able to create a geologically-plausible erosion movie of one of those fractal mountain ranges we see in movies these days.

Time Lapse Movies

Here is a list of our time lapse movies, with the newest at the top. The dates for many of the old ones are approximate. Other fragments and tests are available here.

Description X MB Fmt. Type Date
Across the Rockies at Mach 20 20 499 720p .mov 9 August 2011
Leaving the Adirondacks 20 303 720p .mov 20 June 2011
A surprisingly weird iChat 20 66 720p .mov 25 June 2011
Ellivsdranreb -5, -12 149 720p .mov 27 March 2011
  I pushed a few driving rules for this, but was never unsafe.
An Evening of Fast Solitaire 20 361 720p .mov 22 March 2011
Key West to the mainland 20 642 720p .mov 20 March 2011
My morning commute, in a slot car 20 100 720p .mov 10 March 2011

These will be cataloged shortly: