Everything you wanted to know about long timelapse with GoPro cameras
Cliff's Long GoPro Timelapse page
Preparing for and Processing your finished timelapse sequence
If however you are about to attempt your first really long timelapse, there are a few things you should know.
1. You will need a good software Timelapse Calculator, into which you will put the information you do know about things like "How many days do you need to shoot over, how long do you want the finished video to be, what frame size will you need, how much space will it take up on your video card?" etc. A good calculator will suck up as much as you can give it and spit out the rest. I have been using GoPro Companion on my iPad with great success but even it stumbles on really long timelapses e.g. greater than 9 days. I have tried many of the offerings for Android and haven't come up with anything as good as these below. Which means we are constrained to doing our calculations before we head to site with camera and batteries in hand, rather than doing the calculations on site.
Cam-Do have their own calculator on their website at https://cam-do.com/pages/photography-time-lapse-calculator. It's a real cracker - and coming from the people who built the devices that allow us to do really long timelapses, what would we expect? Seriously, this has absolutely everything you need to know - including SD card requirements and battery power consumption. And its free!
Here's an example of the requirements for a 90 day shoot - click the image for an expanded version:
Then there is this one from https://www.photopills.com/calculators/timelapse. This one is probably the easiest to use as it gives an opportunity to choose which missing value you wish to calculate as the first part of the process.
SD Card requirements. This is always a tricky issue - I have had serious grief from problems with cards. But here is the recommended data from GoPro. Click the image to go to the website. You can test the speed of your SD Card with Cam-Do's tool here: https://cam-do.com/pages/sd-card-speed-tester
So you have read all of this, done all of this, raced into the outback and have an SD card with a shitload of images on it in .jpg format. Dang - You notice that the files are split between folders named something like 360GOPRO, 361GOPRO etc!
To get all of the .jpg's off into a single directory, (PC users only), just open the SD card in Explorer then click anywhere in the right hand screen and in the search bar at the top right, just type in "jpg" without the inverted commas. The search box will fill with every jpg on the card. Select all of the images when the search is finished and copy them to another folder on your pc. You should at this point eject the SD card as it contains all of the original files and you don't want to bugger it up.
You then use GoPro Studio to import the files into a new sequence, by clicking on the first file in the sequence under "Import New Files" at the top left. If all goes well just create your timelapse video with GoPro Studio. You can then edit it, add sound tracks, or whatever else you require.
If GoPro studio is struggling with the file sizes, you can use IRFANVIEW to do a batch conversion of the files to smaller file sizes around 1MB then the program should crunch through without any problems.
Sometimes it will appear that only a percentage of the files actually import into GoPro Studio. You know this because you opened the first frame in the folder, saw what it was, then opened the last frame, didn't you? You then dragged the slider in the GoPro video and noticed that the end of the video did not show the last frame you were expecting?
If this is the case, close GoPro Studio, go to the folder where the images are now stored, and make sure they are all indexed by the the date taken with the earliest frame at the top.
To do a bulk rename do CTRL+A to select all of the frames. They will turn blue. Right click the top one only then select "Rename".
Delete the original file name then put in something like Timelapse(10000) so that the filename now looks like Timelapse(10000).jpg. (The number in the brackets is important - if you have say 10,000 frames make the first number 10000. This will ensure that when GoPro Studio imports them it will do so sequentially.) Press "Enter" and the whole bundle of files will be renamed in a few seconds.
If you still notice that GoPro Studio still won't complete the full import, you can sort them by size and see if there are any dud files with smaller sizes. A single zero byte file will halt an import. If any delete those, re-sort and rename the whole bunch again and import them again. If that doesn't work, book a plane to Australia and bring the SD card with you.
Once you have been able to complete the import of the still images., you should be able to export your video. GoPro chooses .avi as this step. Once the .avi has been produced you can then export the file in your chosen format. I set mine to Custom, then File Format as H264(MP4), with frame size to match the source, and 25fps for PAL. I leave the bitrate alone.
So if you have successfully arrived here you should have by now exported your video from GoPro Studio in the format of your choice.
If you are not going to edit it you can pump it straight up to Vimeo or Youtube or whatever you want to use. I use Vimeo but always edit it. I bring the exported .mp4 produced by GoPro Studio onto the time line of my chosen editor. I have an old copy of Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 which even after all of these years still serves me adequately. Use whatever you prefer.
Audio tracks can be sourced Royalty Free from a fantastic site called Melody Loops. Fees are reasonable and there is a huge list of titles.
Other sophisticated and useful software for creating your timelapse materpiece is Adobe PhotoShop Lightroom, which can export a collection of images as a video if you have put the appropriate plugins (Adobe removed the ability to export video some time ago). I refuse to rent software and will continue with my 6 year old version.
King of the castle is Gunther Wagner's masterpiece "LRTimelapse". It interfaces with Lightroom to bring huge potential to smoothing out your blocky, choppy videos and turning them into works of art.
So here's a short sample of what you can do with all of the information provided above. This clip was filmed over 5 hours at a local Military Parade, with my GoPro Hero3 Black with intervalometer and 12V external battery perched under the street CCTV camera. Authorities are still trying to find me.
That's all Folks. Happy timelapsing.
