Long-Term Construction Time-Lapse

Construction timelapse is a powerful tool that allows you to monitor any construction processes in real time. Using such technology, you will be able to capture the transformation of a new construction site into a finished architectural structure.

At the same time, construction timelapse photography can be very different. And one of the ways is long-term timelapse photography. Which is very different from everything you have done before - especially from short-term timelapse photography.

There are four areas where long-term time-lapse photography has unique requirements. These are the equipment, production, post-production, and business side of long-term time-lapse video. First, long-term time-lapse photography requires specialized equipment. This equipment must cover a number of different things. It must power the camera and controller for the duration of the project, it must be able to turn the camera off and on, and it must be able to trigger the shoot at regular intervals.

Most long-term time-lapse video systems connect to the cloud, both to send status reports and photos, and to receive configuration changes as the project progresses. This ensures smooth operation throughout the project.

The equipment you need is a camera and a lens. However, don’t worry that you need a high-end full-frame DSLR. For long-term time-lapse shooting, an entry-level DSLR will do. The crop sensor will give you enough quality to create your time-lapse video.

So, long-term time-lapse photography is unique because of the equipment used, and the second reason it is unique is, of course, the production itself. First, the intervals. Here you need to pay special attention to what changes you are documenting with time-lapse photography. Are you tracking people moving around the site, buildings, cranes? If so, then short-term time-lapse photography is more suitable because you need to shoot at short intervals. In 95% of cases, with long-term time-lapse photography, the change you are recording is the construction site itself.

So the changes that we're capturing are happening quite slowly. And so you're going to end up taking photos at much longer intervals. There's a whole bunch of things that you need to consider here that have to do with the data requirements if you're uploading photos, have to do with the expectations of your clients if they're using them to monitor a project. So there's a lot of consideration that needs to be given to what interval to use for long-term time-lapse video. For most projects, taking photos every 10 to 30 minutes works best.

Another thing that you need to plan well when you're doing a long-term time-lapse is where you're going to set up your camera, and there are a number of things to consider here too. Is the location easy to access? Is it easy to access throughout the project if you need to go and do maintenance? Where is the sun, not just on the day you go and do your scouting, but at different times of the year? Where are you going to put your solar panel? Everything needs to be considered. Make sure you've taken the time to do the proper scouting and plan it out properly.

Another thing to consider is a plan for when things go wrong. In a perfect world, nothing ever goes wrong and everything is always perfect. But in the reality of a long-term timeframe, you need to plan and budget for site visits because the last thing you want to do is miss the budget and suddenly lose money instead of making money on the project.

Finally, don't just think about the final video you're going to deliver at the end of the project. Recording takes place over months, if not years. So when planning your long-term stop motion project, make sure you also plan how you're going to present the results of the shoot at each step along the way.

So, long-term frame-by-frame video editing is unique in the equipment you're going to use, it's unique in production, and of course it's unique in the post-production stage.

The main problem with post-processing with long-timelapse is how to deal with these huge changes in lighting, or as time-lapse photographers usually call it, flicker. With long-timelapse, you have lighting flicker when the lighting changes, but you also have object flicker. One photo has a truck, the next photo doesn't, one photo has a crane, the next photo has a person, and so on. And if you just stitch the resulting photos together, it's not going to look great.

There are two ways to approach this problem. The first is to edit the material yourself, manually. The second option, if you don’t have the time or desire to work on editing yourself, is to use a frame-by-frame generator. A frame-by-frame generator will perform all the post-processing steps for you and produce a fully edited frame-by-frame film.

Long-term time-lapse footage is popular right now, but let's be honest, one angle of a construction project for a two-minute video over a two-year project isn't necessarily going to hold the viewer's attention. So it's important to think about how you can spice up that video to keep people's attention. Using drone footage might be a good idea, as well as a mix of short-term time-lapse footage of some key moments during the construction.

Other ways to make the final time-lapse video more interesting are to add motion graphics with project statistics or to zoom in on details, panning the image to capture different points of interest.

Finally, the last thing to consider is the business aspect of creating a long-term time-lapse video. It is important to think of a long-term time-lapse video not just as an end product, but as a process. For this reason, uploading photos to an online gallery in particular provides more accurate, real-time information that helps make important business decisions through continuous monitoring. It will also provide archival photo logs that can be used in the event of any disputes.

All of these things are incredibly valuable and allow you to create quality long-term timelapse photography. So it's important to think about all of these things when you're starting a long-term timelapse project.