A time-lapse is a video assembled from still photographs taken at a fixed interval. Sunsets, cloud movement over a ridge and the Milky Way wheeling overhead all suit it, and all of them fail for the same reason: the shoot ends before the sequence is long enough, or the interval was wrong for the subject. The Time-lapse tool turns "I want a 20-second clip of this sunset" into "shoot every 5 seconds for 40 minutes".
They are connected by simple arithmetic:
frames = duration × 60 ÷ interval clip length (s) = frames ÷ fps
Enter the interval, duration and frame rate in Tools › Time-lapse and it returns the frame count and clip length. A 60-minute shoot at a 5-second interval gives 720 frames, which is 30 seconds at 24 fps. If you wanted a 10-second clip you could stop after 20 minutes — or shoot the full hour at a 15-second interval.
| Subject | Interval |
|---|---|
| Fast clouds, busy street | 1–3 s |
| Sunset, slow clouds, tide | 3–8 s |
| Shadows crossing a landscape | 10–30 s |
| Milky Way, star trails | 20–40 s (shutter plus a few seconds) |
Too short an interval wastes card space and battery; too long and motion becomes jerky. For the night sky the interval is dictated by the shutter: use the Stars tool (guide 5) to get the NPF shutter, then add 2–3 seconds for the camera to write the file.
Cinema convention is a shutter open for half the frame interval — the "180-degree shutter" — which gives natural motion blur. Applied to time-lapse, the shutter should stay open for a good fraction of the interval: at a 5-second interval, a 2-second exposure blurs moving cloud into smooth streaks, while a 1/500 exposure produces a jittery, strobing sky. Use an ND filter (guide 8) to force the long exposure in daylight.
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