RasterWeb!
Despite what appears to be confusion in this photo, I really do know how to assemble and operate a RED ONE camera… Really. You need something shot? Let me know. I mean, it’s not like you’re going to shoot it on your Scarlet. Of course, if you’ve got an EPIC, we’d make a great second unit.
Photo by Mike Krukowski (Thanks Mike!) Processing by me and Photoshop CS5.
I built the original “Time Lapse Bot” in September 2009 before BarCampMilwaukee4 happened. I managed to get an old office chair that someone was throwing away and thought I could put it to good use to move around the iMac and camera rig I had attached to it. You can see the original Time Lapse Bot post for more info.
The main issue with the original Time Lapse Bot was that if you unplugged it, you had to boot it up again, set the clock, and then restart the image capture. We thought about a UPS to give it a bit of “unplugged” time, but never added one.
Next up was Time Lapse Bot 2 which used an old clamshell iBook in place of the old iMac. This made everything much lighter but because the battery couldn’t hold a charge we still suffered the inability to unplug it and move it while it was running. (We typically solved this problem with really long extension cords.)
Time Lapse Bot 3 is the next step in Time Lapse Bot technology. We’ve taken an old PowerBook G4 (donated by Matt Gauger) which has a good battery in it, and paired it with a Canon ZR800 MiniDV camera, which also has a good battery. The result is a unit that can run on battery (at least for a few hours) and starts charging the batteries as soon as you plug in the AC power cord.
The entire unit is housed in a custom case which allows for easy transport. By “custom case” we’re referring to the plywood box that I constructed and painted black. That’s what we consider the pinnacle of “custom cases” around here.
The software that runs Time Lapse Bot is EvoCam by Evological. It’s $30 and well worth it. It’s feature packed, and rock solid. If you’re putting together a Mac-based time lapse rig that uses a video camera, or a web cam, or whatever, I highly recommend it.
Here’s a few of the time lapse videos we’ve made with the help of Time Lapse Bot.
We’ve finally reached a point where we are fairly pleased with Time Lapse Bot and it’s performance, so this is obviously not the time to sit still and relax. We’re currently working on a few upgrades to Time Lapse Bot, and hope 2011 brings even more Time Lapse Bot goodness to all the folks who enjoy time lapse videos…
(Thanks for reading this. If you’re reading it on Facebook or Google Reader or somewhere else it got syndicated to, consider visiting the original post, especially if you’d like to leave a comment.)
We’re about two months past BarCampMilwaukee5, and I stumbled across an old blog post of mine titled BarCampMilwaukee2: Ideas which was posted about two months before BarCampMilwaukee2 happened. I hope that made sense…
The post mentions a few things that we wanted to do at the time, and I’m happy to say we’ve (finally) accomplished a few of these things.
Kevin had the following suggestion:
Podcasts. There is no time of year better then when the SXSW podcast feed fires up again. I think video of the whole confab will be too intense and would require some people to be in production all day. That’s no fun. I was thinking of setting up audio recorders and running them non stop. Video of some more interesting visual sessions (read robots) would be neat. In fact, we should have a session room dedicated to video so were not schlepping stuff all over.
Ah yes… Audio! Kevin says “I was thinking of setting up audio recorders and running them non stop.” Well, we came pretty close on that one. The Convo Droid consists of a Zoom H2 Handy Portable Stereo Recorder with an 8GB SD card. It can easily record over 30 hours of high quality audio. I ran it pretty much non-stop during BarCampMadison3 and BarCampMilwaukee5. I captured a ton of audio. In fact, I probably still haven’t processed it all yet. (We need to define a process for BarCampMilwaukee6 to mark the beginning/end of a session, and do a better job of tagging the audio.) For BarCampMilwaukee5 we also had Gabe Wollenburg and Joshua Cowles capturing audio. Most of it showed up on the BarCampMilwaukee Blog (I also set up my own site to allow for automagic download “podcast style” see my audio tag for more info.)
Kevin also mentions video… a bit more resource intensive than audio, but still doable. For BarCampMadison3 I had two MiniDV video cameras, and a handful of blank tapes. I managed to capture a number of sessions, which you can find by browsing through the barcampmadison3 tag. I would have recorded more, but I ran out of tapes… I was able to do a lot of video capture at BarCampMadison3 because I wasn’t really involved in organizing or running it, so I was free to capture. For BarCampMilwaukee5, I was too involved in running things to deal with setting up cameras and swapping tapes.
If all goes as planned, we’ll have at least one room in Bucketworks wired up for quality audio/video capture at the push of a button before BarCampMilwaukee6 rolls around…
And if you’re wondering why we care so much about capturing and publishing the audio and video from BarCamp, it goes to the core of what the event is all about sharing knowledge, not just with the people at the event, but the people who couldn’t make it, or don’t know what BarCamp is yet. Share what you know… Learn what you don’t. :)
Time Lapse Bot was quite proud to be called into service to help create this time lapse video of the process of assembling and lighting the Christmas Tree at The Pfister Hotel in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
I realized that I never got any good photos of Time Lapse Bot 3. I’ll have to schedule a session and get some shots… We’re also planning a series of upgrades for Time Lapse Bot, with the goals of: better mobility, better picture quality, and more interesting time lapsing abilities. 2011 should be the quite the year for Time Lapse Bot technology.
If you’d like to have Time Lapse Bot capture one of your events, get in touch with me.
BarCampMilwaukee5 was held October 2nd and 3rd, 2010 at Bucketworks in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
When we were planning BarCampMilwaukee5, Gabe asked if there was a way to point a video camera at people as they introduced themselves and project it on the wall. My answer was “yes” and we pulled together all the equipment to do it, and I somehow became the camera operator. As long as I was rolling, I threw a tape in, and this is the result.
This video is about 43 minutes long, and while I compressed it as much as I could without losing too much quality, it’s still about 480MB. I hope it serves as a historic element of the fifth BarCamp held in Milwaukee. You’ll see the people who were at the opening session and hear just a little bit about them.
This video is released under a Creative Commons Attribution License. You can also find this video at blip.tv or download an MP4. Enjoy!