[vimeo 106877886 w=800 h=450]
People these days have short attention-spans, so although time-lapse videos can be very appealing, most of us would probably prefer to watch one for 30 seconds rather than ten minutes. Thanks to a clever feature which Apple simply refers to as “dynamically selected intervals,” almost any time-lapse video you shoot in the default Camera app in iOS 8 will end up as 20-40 seconds, whether you shoot for 10 minutes or two hours …
The secret was revealed by Studio Neat, the people behind the Glif tripod mount for the iPhone.
Turns out, what Apple is doing is quite simple, and indeed, pretty clever. What Apple means by “dynamically selected intervals” is they are doubling the speed of the time-lapse and taking half as many pictures per second as the recording duration doubles. Sounds complex, but it’s actually very simple.
Studio Neat compiled the results of their tests into a simple table:
What this means is that a five-minute time-lapse will be captured at two frames a second and end up 20 seconds long at 30fps. A 40-minute time-lapse will be captured at one frame every four seconds and thus also end up 20 seconds long.
You don’t need to know in advance how long your time-lapse will be: the Camera app will automatically switch frame-rates as the recording time increases, dropping frames from earlier sections to match.
If you haven’t yet tried time-lapse photography, you can get some inspiration through examples, then check out our how-to guide for everything you need to know.
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Cool feature, but it would be nice if we could override this and pick a speed for ourselves.
The ProCam app allows you to set manually from 1 photo each second all the way to 1 photo each 300 seconds.
I use iMovie to slow my time-lapse videos.
Hyperlapse (an app by Instagram) lets you do this
i don’t have the patience to leave my phone sitting somewhere for that amount of time.
Me neither!
That’s brilliant. I can see this annoying some people, but what doesn’t these days.
Very cool technique indeed.
I Agree!
I wish you could adjust your shot framerate it would be nice to have longer shots in general, HOWEVER, this is the Apple way…give something the average user can just use and enjoy and if you want better…go to the App Store.
Makes sense. Thankfully there is an easy toggle for 120/240 fps in SloMo.
Is that 360 in Austin TX? Cool video
It is!
Needs to include a slider to adjust total film length.
Thanks for this very clear explanation of how it works. I had Googled and looked at some other sites, which were more “how-to-do” and all left out this important detail.
Everything was fine when I started doing time lapse on iPhone6. I could let it run until the battery ran out. Now it stops in the middle of my sessions with a message indicating not enough storage. Yet when I check available storage there is a lot left. ?