If you ever wanted to record an afternoon of the clouds floating by, stars moving through the night sky or the hustle and bustle of a city street on a busy afternoon, time-lapse can help you to capture the dynamic nature of those things in accelerated real-time videos.
Time-lapse is a creative filming and video editing technique that manipulates how frame rate is captured. Frame rate is the number of images or frames, that appear in a second of video. In most videos, the frame rate and playback speed are the same. In a time-lapse video, the frame rate is stretched out far more: when played back at average speed, time appears to be speeded up.
“It’s the reality around you, but speeded up in a way that you can see it unfold in real time,” videographer and storm-chaser Mike Olbinski says. Subtle processes that barely appear to the human eye, like plants growing or shifting weather patterns, are perfect subjects for time-lapse films and photography.
Time-lapse can also refer to a camera’s shutter speed (how long the camera’s shutter remains open to let light in). A similar effect to time-lapse is found in stop-motion videos. The subject doesn’t move but seems to be in motion because it’s manually or repeatedly moved and then photographed. The images are then strung together to create video-like motion.