timelapse durations?

As my first post to this fine forum I would like opinions on setups for a job I just did on a Panasonic HMC150. It was at a local Horse Racing track and the plan was to shoot from the infield into the stands and roll for 90 minutes as the stands filled up. Rather than try to do the whole thing in camera, the editor, who was with me at the time, wanted me to do the straight roll and let her Avid sort it out. As we were getting to the end of our sd card we got a call from the manager asking if we could extend our timelapse to include the first race which would turn our 90 minute timelapse into a 2.5 hour timelapse. At this time I had approx. 10 minutes left on the card so I started rolling 4 seconds of every minute. We made it and it turned out well/happy client and all that but I am left to wonder how it could have been done in camera if had to do it all over on my shiny new EX1R. In the footage we shot you can see a change in rhythm on the footage as we went to the 4 second out of 60 part of the shot. Your thoughts?

Thanks

mb

[alisterchapman]

Very easy to do with any EX camera. The simplest way to do it is to set timelapse to 1 frame every 1 second. This is the shortest Interval. for a 2.5 hour shooting period you would have ended up with a clip 6 minutes long. You can then adjust the speed of that 6 minute clip in the edit suite to get the final speed that you want. If 6 minutes is still too long and going to take too much card space then you could use a longer interval.

The 1 frame per second interval would no doubt be the safest and give you the most flexibility in post. I look forward to doing some experiments as time permits. Thanks for being such a great resource Alister; not just here but DVinfo and your other pages have given me a lot of help in deciding to buy this camera and to better know what I'm doing now that I have it.
Best Regards

mb

Mark,

If you use an iPhone I created an app that enables one to quickly compute the parameters of a timelapse event. I initially did the calculations on paper, then eventually I created an XL spreadsheet that I printed out and carried around with me. After getting an iPhone I decided I could incorporate the computations into an app, which I did.

You can read about the app here: http://www.clamcamvideo.com/video_accessories.html#app

Carroll Lam