Time Lapse

This weekend's little project was to record a time lapse sequence of me doing a quick Bert.

I had a nice picture of my malodourous subject taken somewhere between breakfast and morning snooze. This sits in front of me on the monitor.

I have assembled a very Heath Robinson affair out of Suzanne's selfie stick and my Gorilla Grip Zoom camera tripod which, with the help of a ream of printer paper, is cantilevering my phone over my desk at an altitude just above my forehead.

I have downloaded a series of time lapse apps and they're all pretty rubbish because this is an Android house with no Apples to be seen. Best of class at this juncture: Microsoft Hyperlapse.

Off we go.

First take; tripod falls over.

Second take; I manage to get my head between camera and artwork.

Third take; moderate success. Good enough!

Now to try and edit the resulting video. I have exactly the tool for this: Adobe Premier Pro.

I have not read even the first line of a tutorial, but that's never been a problem in the past. Sans-tutorial, I've mastered the Python programming language, risk and compliance consultancy, my chemistry degree and light aircraft.

Premier Pro; wow! Every single function seems to not do what I want or expect. Every online tip is for a different version of the software and boy, does it change from release to release. And the function vocabulary? It's as if the film editors' union had had a hand in making it. Jabbering wreck in under an hour.

All I wanted to do was rotate the video 180 degrees (Un-upside-down function, please), crop it slightly and, finally, remove the last three seconds of Microsoft's "Richard's cheap and is using a free version of this software" branding.

Suzanne achieved all the above in under a minute using Instagram's embedded tools. And added a sound track. And published it.

I ended up with half a gigabyte of uselessness in just over an hour and a half.

So here's the link to Instagram until I can work the damn software out and post my own version.

One thing Suzanne did remove, though, was my "mic drop" which I thought was great. Suzanne thought it was (inserted polite word) crass. I just thought the pen landed in such a perfect position I looked like Robbie Williams on a really good day... sigh