How to Choose a TIme Lapse Interval

These are tips for helping you choose the best possible time lapse interval for whatever it is that you are trying to shoot.

Catering to new, intermediate, and or infrequent time lapsers who just want to get great results with minimal effort.

In this video I'm diving into time lapse intervals, what they are, how to choose which one best suits your needs.

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[Tonellacam]

Thank you I needed a masterclass in intervals and you delivered like a fresh pizza right to my door !!!

[WarerBrow]

hey, that's pretty much all what I need to shoot a time lapse! thanks

[princesslizzy]

Very clear video. Thank you. You now have a new subscriber. 🎉

[palomavano]

Thank you for providing such an informative and easy-to-understand video.

[markolson]

That was good and helpful. I'll have to play it over again but that's fine. Yhank you!

[MikeAzul]

Thanks so much for the particular use-case examples and visual examples!

[chase_with_jase]

Great video been experimenting with time lapses of storms and weather. Hoping to come to the USA in 2026 to go chasing some of those huge mid western storms but trying to perfect the technique first (I'm in Australia) Thanks for all the tips.

[tzen]

Loved the Pizza analogy, now im hungry. 😂

[joyflgrl]

Thank you! This is all very helpful and very clear. You mentioned in one of the examples adding a time stamp to the time lapse and I’m wondering how to do it. Right now, I’m using Lapse It and my iPhone, but I have a variety of Adobe programs I could use after the fact. Do you have a sense of what is a simple, straightforward way to do this? I’m trying to take readings of how much sunlight different areas inside and outside of my house get so that I can determine what vegetables can be planted in different places. A lot of the sunlight happens in hours when I’ll be sleeping, which is why a recording is particularly helpful. Right now, I’ve included a large physical clock in my videos but it is rather cumbersome and a bit hard to read. I can imagine when I’m trying to make time lapse videos that are for less utilitarian purposes, it could be really nice sometimes to have a more subtle clock.

[iy]

Anyone know Whats the best interval for snowfall.I wanna film Snow falling in my garden thankss

[collay]

I am sorry but I am slightly confused, if my timelapse intervals have to be every 5 seconds, what would my shutter speed be please? Any help would be greatly appreciated ✌️

[douggingerich]

Hey Scott, I have to shoot solar panels that follow the sun over a 12 hour period. What interval would you recommend?

[oneeyedphotographer]

I work on 300 frames as a starting point. It gives Yanks ten seconds of video, the rest of us a little more, and the arithmetic is easier. 300 seconds is 15 minutes, a quarter hour.

It's not focal length you should be talking about, it's angle of view _in the finished video._ (That's underscored). I might shoot at 90 degrees (that's quite wide), but crop to 30 degrees (that's not so wide), and perhaps I can figure how to pseudo-pan so I have my 30 degree viewpoint moving across the entire imaged area.

Angle of view is better than focal length as it's independent of sensor size and cropping in PP.

The autistic in me thinks the shutter speed is likely 6mm/msec. Exposure duration is a useful measure of what's going on.

The exposure duration vs interval gets hard to do when you are shooting long intervals. 12 hours for one frame per day? Panasonic says the longest recommended for one of my cameras is 15 minutes. I expect it gets a little warm.

[FullFinnoy]

...or just use Lumix S5IIx in 2025. Done.