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Lessons learned from my first indoor time lapse video

We had a case where some small ants were showing up in our kitchen.

I put down some ant bait and thought it could be interesting to look at a time lapse of the ants gathering the bait over a period of several hours.

I've got an old GoPro Hero 4 that can record a time lapse at 4k, so I set that up on a little GoPro tripod thing, plugged in a battery pack and started recording.

Several hours later I started editing and quickly realized that I had missed a few things in terms of preparation, oops! Let me point out a few of them here in the hope that you can avoid these issues if and when you record a time lapse.

Inconsistent lighting

As soon as I started editing it became apparent that pretty much each frame differed greatly in brightness. I'm guessing this was due to clouds. It took hours in post-processing to adjust add key frames to adjust the brightness thousands of frames. While the final result looked much better, avoiding the issue entirely with consistent brightness could have saved all of the trouble.

Before
After brightness correction

I'd advise setting up a light source to ensure consistent brightness throughout the recording.

GoPro recording led

GoPros, at least the Hero Black 4 I have, has a few different red leds that flash during recording.

When the ambient brightness in the room started getting lower, the flashing red led on the face of the camera started showing up in the recording.

Not blinking
Red tinge from blinking

Turns out you can disable any one of the recording leds on the GoPro.

Using an external power supply

This worked out really well actually. I plugged in an Anker 26800mAh battery into the GoPro via its USB mini-b cable and sat it on the floor next to the camera. This provided enough power to record for some 6+ hours. Without some kind of external supply you'd end up having to monitor and change the GoPro's batteries and if you shifted its position you'd end up with a not as nice looking time lapse recording.

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