The web is awash with Timelapse. It started with Ross Ching and his Eclectic series, and now Tom at Timescapes.org has started to do some really amazing stuff particularly in low light. This has kicked off Philip Bloom as well.

Now, if you want to have a go at timelapse and you're using a Mac to put the sequences together then you really should make use of Automator as well. I mean, you don't really fancy resizing thousands of images by hand do you?! (Or even working with bigger files than you need to....!)

When shooting timelapse, you have no need to shoot at full res. In fact, you're better off shooting at Medium or Small JPEG to save card space and because you don't need all that file size to create a full HD film. However, even with the Small or Medium JPEG settings on cameras like the EOS 5D Mark II and EOS 7D your files will still be bigger than needed and also the wrong format. Automator can solve this problem for you quickly and easily. 

The settings for Automator that I use are as follows:

1. Get Specified Finder Items

2. Copy Finder Items (to ensure you don't resize the originals)

3. Get Folder Items

4. Crop images: To Dimensions (1920x1080) Scale before crop: Scale to Width.

This will take your files and crop them to the 1920x1080 resolution ready to be put into an image sequence. It's also quicker to do this to the files beforehand rather than trying to deal with over large files afterwards. 

If you're a Mac user and you can't be bothered to create the automator action yourself, I've created it for you and you can download it from here. Just unzip it and import it to Automator. I'd then save it as an application on your desktop so you can just drop files onto it to re-size. 

Back from a bit of a break I thought I'd share some thoughts about free stuff (almost free), Apple iMovie 09.

On this latest trip then I shot a variety of pictures and cameras with a view to make a short multimedia movie of the holiday. Also travelling light I took an older MacBook as it's smaller and lighter. I used iMovie 09 whilst away to build up the story of the trip mixing video from a Digital IXUS, EOS and a video camera plus stills from the IXUS and EOS too. End result is something that the family appreciates and means we can get a feeling of the holiday in about 10 minutes maximum.

The key here is that iMovie 09 is free with a Mac and only around fifty pounds if you have to update from an older edition. In my view Apple cut too much out of iMovie 08 in the drive to make it simpler, iMovie 09 is really a great option and leaves me wondering how Apple will continue to sell Final Cut Express, iMovie 09 is really that good.

 

If you use an Apple MAC and have OS-X 10.5 then most likely you've been running 10.5.6 lately, but now 10.5.7 is now available to download and if you didn't get it already do so...

In MAC OS 10.5.6 Apple seemingly broke the tethered shooting functions making it very tough for users to shoot with cameras connected to the laptop. Typical symptoms include freezing of the whole computer, lock up of DPP or EOS Utility or similar. Usually it happens after around 15 minutes of continuous tethering, sometimes after 20 or more images have been transferred. MAC OS-X 10.5.7 seems to fix this, though there's no mention of fixes to USB on the <a href="http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3397">update release notes</a>.

To try it out we hooked up an EOS-1D Mark III and left it in live view mode for over 30 minutes it was still all alive and working and we could then pick the camera up and shoot a couple of hundred frames straight in to the MAC; just like you could do with MAC OS-X 10.5.5.

One thing that 10.5.7 brings is<a href="http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1475"> support for RAW images from EOS 5D Mark II, EOS 50D and PowerShot G10</a> according to the release note information.