Uploaded February 2021 | Updated September 2026, 37 minutes ago
Here is why this was frustrating to make:
This is 3.5 hours of recording. I have a tripod and an external power supply, but my SD card is only 64 GB where I would have needed 256GB to record this in one piece instead of 3 with ~10 minutes of copying the contents where the recording had to skip. (And even if it was worth the money, by the time I got it the snow would likely be gone.) In 4K I only have the option of a minimum of 24 FPS at 100 Mbit/s where I would have loved to just custom-set it lower. Plus I didn't expect the snowball to take so long to melt (compressed snow much longer than loose one), so I probably would have had to keep the room artificially lit with the shutters closed during the recording to achieve static lighting conditions.
So the perfect artistic effect of this project was a bit ruined.
At first I wanted to try again the next day using the camera's time lapse feature, but sadly even though this is exactly what I need it for, it was not feasible. First I would have had to figure out whether I can prevent it from yielding very differently exposed results from one frame to the other (weird that it would do that with nothing in the lighting changing), secondly the shutter operates for every shot (=frame) and that would have meant a shutter click every three seconds over several hours in the room where I work on my PC. And I am also not comfortable with running my camera through ~15k shutter operations just for that.
Surprisingly, the easiest part was the processing, because in Davinci Resolve I could simply set the video speed to -20000% and that's it. And these days Handbrake can even read the Avid codec, which is great because XMediaRecode crashes all the time with high resolution like this unless I set encoding quality to very low and is also prone to compression glitches there.
And I have to use Avid because Resolve's H264 encoder is total experimental crap, at least in the version of the program that does not require Windows 10.
Hell, even for Linux it is only available as RedHat package, so not even switching to Linux would simplify this. Besides, the devs really data-kraken you every time you want to download the program.
So I ended up still using the relatively unshitty Windows 7 with an old version of a generally quite performant feee video editing program.
The recorded source footage for this time lapse has a size of 143 GB. The rendered Avid .MOV file has a size of 13.1 GB (to avoid quality loss in recoding.)
Here is why this was frustrating to make:
This is 3.5 hours of recording. I have a tripod and an external power supply, but my SD card is only 64 GB where I would have needed 256GB to record this in one piece instead of 3 with ~10 minutes of copying the contents where the recording had to skip. (And even if it was worth the money, by the time I got it the snow would likely be gone.) In 4K I only have the option of a minimum of 24 FPS at 100 Mbit/s where I would have loved to just custom-set it lower. Plus I didn't expect the snowball to take so long to melt (compressed snow much longer than loose one), so I probably would have had to keep the room artificially lit with the shutters closed during the recording to achieve static lighting conditions.
So the perfect artistic effect of this project was a bit ruined.
At first I wanted to try again the next day using the camera's time lapse feature, but sadly even though this is exactly what I need it for, it was not feasible. First I would have had to figure out whether I can prevent it from yielding very differently exposed results from one frame to the other (weird that it would do that with nothing in the lighting changing), secondly the shutter operates for every shot (=frame) and that would have meant a shutter click every three seconds over several hours in the room where I work on my PC. And I am also not comfortable with running my camera through ~15k shutter operations just for that.
Surprisingly, the easiest part was the processing, because in Davinci Resolve I could simply set the video speed to -20000% and that's it. And these days Handbrake can even read the Avid codec, which is great because XMediaRecode crashes all the time with high resolution like this unless I set encoding quality to very low and is also prone to compression glitches there.
And I have to use Avid because Resolve's H264 encoder is total experimental crap, at least in the version of the program that does not require Windows 10.
Hell, even for Linux it is only available as RedHat package, so not even switching to Linux would simplify this. Besides, the devs really data-kraken you every time you want to download the program.
So I ended up still using the relatively unshitty Windows 7 with an old version of a generally quite performant feee video editing program.
The recorded source footage for this time lapse has a size of 143 GB. The rendered Avid .MOV file has a size of 13.1 GB (to avoid quality loss in recoding.)
