On Fri, 29 Nov 2002 18:22:20 -0000, Anthony Watson wrote:

>We want to film various stages of our house construction, primarily items
>like the foundation being poured.
>
>Our old 8mm camcorder could tape up to 2 hours on a single tape, but our
>new Digital8 camcorder is limited to 1 hour. Once we start the tape and
>begin pouring the concrete, we'll be too busy to go back and change the
>tape (even more difficult with the bottom load camcorder).

D8 90-min tapes are available from Sony, and these can be run in LP-mode, providing about 2:17 run
time...

>Since I usually speed up the finished video anyway to fit in a 5 minute
>time slot or so, what I really need is some way to do time lapse. A couple
>of pictures each second or so would be great.
>
>I "think" my Sony TRV-230 camcorder has an LP mode that would extend the
>recording time to 90 minutes or so, but I worry that still may not be
>enough time.

See above...;-)

>So, I'm wondering what options I have.
>
>Is there a way to slow down the camcorder, perhaps with external software
>on a laptop through a firewire connection?
>
>Or, is there some way to do this with our digital camera or a web cam of
>some type?

You can also use the D8 camera as just that, running it into
a computer with FireWire, having Premiere grab frames - and
you can shoot still cameras with data-backs that will shoot
interval images (you would need to scan these). I don't know
if there are inexpensive digital still cameras that will
shoot frames at intervals. Many 3-CCD cameras have built-in
interval shooting, though these shoot about six frames at
a time...