Experimentation with time lapse video

Bunch of low shutter-speed snaps put together in a video for an experimental time lapse video.

How I did this:

1. Used Canon Vixia HF 200 camcorder mounted on a tripod, in picture mode (shutter priority Tv mode). Shutter speed was set at the lowest (1/2 sec) to capture nice motion blurs of speeding cars. This also makes a smooth transition between snaps for the pleasure of your eyes, otherwise a normal/auto shutter speed will make it waver or flicker.

2. Exposure was set in auto mode (I did not lock it as all the pictures were taken within a short time, say, 30 minutes or so which does not change the outside sunlight/brightness so much). You can lock it if you think the brightness may change. Actually, you can see at the last part of the video how the evening slowly sets in and this causes the brightness to change, but it was intentional.

3. Having collected all the pictures, I used a Linux terminal to use the open source ffmpeg package to pack up all the snapshots in a video. In total I had 231 pictures and the frame rate was set to 15 fps. I also merged a soundtrack using -i option.
I used this command:
ffmpeg -r 15 -b 1800 -i file%04d.JPG -i music.mp3 -acodec copy -shortest movie.mp4

ffmpeg is a very efficient library and it keeps the file size within limit without much loss of quality. There are hundreds of parameters to ffmpeg and it is kind of difficult to master all of them. For help, see the ffmpeg documentation at http://ffmpeg.org/documentation.html. You can do wonders with ffmpeg! And it is free!!

The bottom line is that you have to chose a good shutter speed and an acceptable frame rate to get a nice video. You can do many combination and decide which one looks good but it is very time consuming. I did some trials and decided on something which is not the best solution, but optimal.