What is the difference between the time-lapse and interval timer functions? My Canon camera has both…
Sarah Baker, Newhaven
BRIAN SAYS… Interval timer and time-lapse are used to capture a series of stills over a period of time, it’s a great way to show the progression of a slowly changing subject over a short time.
Time-lapse shooting is a function available when shooting movies. You preset the number of pictures to be captured and the interval. Most cameras show you how long the sequence will take to capture and the duration of the finished clip. You can capture up to 3600 frames at intervals from 2 seconds to 99 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds. Depending on the camera you might be able to go FHD with 1920x1080 resolution, 4K with 3840x 2160 pixels, or even 8K on the EOS R5. The camera captures the still images and saves the resulting clip as a movie file.
The interval timer function is available when shooting stills, the interval is the same as time-lapse, but a max of 99 shots can be captured. Once the sequence starts, the camera will save images as Raws or JPEGS, based on your camera settings and with the resolution you choose. The camera doesn’t compile the shots for you to make a time-lapse movie, you need to use software on a computer to create the time-lapse clip.
Which to choose will depend on the subject, and what else you might do with the time-lapse. You will get high resolution using the interval timer, and the Raw images can be adjusted for max flexibility. Full resolution makes it possible to pan or zoom around the image when editing the movie. Using the time-lapse mode is simpler, as the resulting movie is ready to work with straight from the camera, and will capture more frames.