Seeking advise on techniques for making a time-lapse movie

Hi, This isn't technically a question having to do with FCE directly, but it seems like a good place to ask. I need to make a time-lapse movie showing the changing daylight on a fixed point from dawn until dusk. It will be edited in FCE, but I have no idea of how many seconds I should shoot at a time, and at what intervals I should shoot them. Or.... would there be any advantage to shooting still photos and then importing them into FCE?
Can you suggest any resources which I could read on the subject?
Thank, Bob

Lets say you are doing this shoot at equinox (ie 12 hrs between sunrise and sunset).
Since most cameras do not hold storage media that can hold 12 hours of media in one file, you need to either use an intervalometer setting on the cam (allowing for incremental recording) or record to an external drive that CAN hold 12 hrs of media.
The approach one takes depends upon the recording limitations. If using external storage that can record the full length, it's just a matter of bringing in the file and speeding it up to whatever makes sense to your needs.
If you are going to use an incremental capture approach, then you really do need to know what will be the speed of the final clip. Is this thing going to play back at real time? 2x, 10x, 100x? Or, asked another way, how long do you want it to run? 30 sec, 1 min, 5 min, 20 min, etc?
Once you know that, it's really simple math to figure out.
Video (in NTSC land) runs at 30 frames per second (29.97 if we are being precise).
This means if you were to record it in real time you'd require 1,296,000 frames
12 hrs x (60 min per hr) x (60 sec per min) x (30 frames per sec).
If you want it to play 100x faster, you would need 12,960 frames. This can be accomplished by recording every 100th possible frame (that is, snapping an image every 3 1/3 seconds)
Or, if you work it backwards - thinking that you'd like to compress 12 hrs to 12 minutes, you'd need to acquire one frame every 2 seconds. (This yields a 60x increase in speed.)
Have fun.
x

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Photoshop/Premiere Elements 13...are either capable of making time lapse movies from still images? I heard this feature was removed from Premiere 13, after I purchased it =(

jorgeavanza
It am not understanding clearly what program is not closing
Photoshop Elements
or
Premiere Elements
There is the AdobePremiereElements.exe for Premiere Elements (video editing) and the PhotoshopElementsEditor.exe for Photoshop Elements (photo editing).
Right now you keep mentioning Premiere Elements, but I am seeing your description more like Photoshop Elements.
Please clarify so that we can focus on the correct program and try to resolve its problems.
Thank you.
ATR

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This tip is ready for submission.
It REPLACES the prior version in the Time Machine forum, at: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2057525
Additions/wording changes to items C3, C4, C5, D4
New topics C9, C10, C11, and E4

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Thanks Sean,
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Seeking websites on Techniques For Shooting Good Footage

Can anyone here recommend a website with good ideas for how to shoot video? I now have a book to guide me for the making/editing of a movie: iLife '04: TEACH YOURSELF VISUALLY / Read Less - Learn More ....
.... but I also would like to learn some simple tips and advice for the actual shooting of footage.
— Lorna in Southern California
17" flatscreen iMac, 1 GHz Power PC G4, 768 MB DDR SDRAM Mac OS X (10.3.9) LaCie external hard drive, 111 Gigabytes

A tutorial I like a lot is "Making Awesome iMovies",
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— Lorna in Southern California

I want to overlay elapsed time for 30 hour time lapse onto 30 minute video.

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Editing clip times for bulk clips (time lapse content)

sorry if this has been asked tons of times, i searched but found no answer.
i'm doing a time lapse video, and have about 500 images uploaded so far. is there any way, after dragging the images down to the timeline, to edit them all at once? i've been doing each one by one, and it's a pain in the *ss.
any help is much appreciated!

G'day davidson,
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Is there a way in FCE HD to discard frames in order to create a time lapse from a video that has already been shot? I realize that the normal way to create a time lapse is to assemble a group of stills into a video. What I'm looking for is sort of the other way around. If this is not possible in FCE HD, does anyone know of other software that can do this?
Thanks,
Bob

Isn't speeding up a clip a lot the same as discarding frames? I've done Modify -> Speed and changed it to 1000% and it looks time-lapsy to me, especially if not much is happening in the clip.

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Seeking advise on techniques for making a time-lapse movie

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