Time Lapse help, mpeg2 from AVCHD

[cjbrown80]

Hello guys,
I'm new to the forum as a user, but I've been reading it for a few years and its awesome. Thanks!
Any way, just having some issues creating a time lapse vid. I just spent 15 hours converting the 10 hour AVCHD footage of a concert setup (from my HDR-SR12, which doesn't have a time lapse function) into MPEG2. Now I can't figure out how to speed up to 600X to make ten hours into one minute. I tried the decimate function at 600 in virtualdubmpeg2 and that kept the ten hour length but cycled frames every 20 seconds. I read in another thread to try avisynth but I can't figure that out as I'm not familiar with the ?scripting? functions. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

-Chris

[daamon]

Hi cjbrown80,

Do the timelapse effect before encoding to MPEG. In fact, do all editing and effects before encoding to MPEG. The MPEG format is not designed to be worked with, its an end product format.

I only know DV AVI, so I'm can't comment on how you'd work with AVCHD. I'll suggest a couple of ways that I know can be done with DV AVI and it might give you ideas:

1) I capture from DV cam to my hard drive using WinDV, and it has a function to capture every n-th frame. So, with NTSC running at (effectively) 30 frames per second, capturing every 30th frame will make 30 seconds last 1 second.

2) An alternative way is to use a non-linear editing tool (I use Premiere Pro, but there are others that are cheaper / free and easier), and you can speed up or slow down using that.

Good luck.

[cjbrown80]

Thanks daamon,
I have Final Cut Pro 5 and Sony Vegas 6. I can't figure out how to speed it up as much as I need it (600x) in either of those softwares. The other thing is the fact that it's such a humongous file in the first place. Anyway, thanks for your post!