18-month time lapse, any ideas?

[WhiskeyPapa]

There are some creative people here, so I thought I'd get some opinions...

I was asked this morning to give a quote for an 18-month time lapse video of a large construction project. I have a few ideas of how I'd accomplish it. One involves a digital camera connected to a computer running some software to control the frame rate (probably one picture per hour during daylight hours.) Of course, I'd want this connected to a broadband connection so I could monitor it without traveling to the worksite.

I'd rather not use a webcam, unless there are some very high quality ones available.

Any other ideas? Has anyone done anything like this?

[verve247]

I'd recommend taking stills from a continuous video stream. You don't save the entire stream btw. This way you have a failsafe to ensure that the camera is still working. And it gives you more leeway in deciding what photos to keep.

[gugnheim]

WhiskeyPapa-
If I recall, someone posted a few months back on the makezine.com blog about just such a thing. He made a self contained security type camera the wirelessly streamed pics to his computer to save of his house being built.

I'll see if I can find it, but worth a search as well.

Gug

[zippyjuan]

I thought it would be interesting to do something like this. Mine would be "24 hours in the Life of A Building" where it goes from an empty lot (or the destruction of a previous building), and have the new pictures be slightly later in the day from the first one (how much later would depend on how many pictures you used) so it looked like it went from nothing at sunrise to complete at sunset and finish with the windows glowing in the night. Video capture would be good- you could select the frames you wanted to give you the correct time of day. Of course you would not get the resolution of a still camera- you would definately want to go digital.

Maybe something useful here? http://www.cinematography.net/Pages%20DW/LongTermTime-lapse.htm