Photography - Camera Gear

March 25, 2024

Canon R5 - time lapse

Video is something I have always avoided like the unclean scourge on all of my cameras. I have thought in that past that it might be interesting and fun to shoot time lapse video. In the past that required buying an intervalometer that tripped the shutter via a remote cable, then collecting a bunch of images on the flash card, and then using some unknown to me software to convert that image series into some video format.

The Canon R5 does all of that in camera, producing an MP4 video as the final product! I just gave it a try and it was pretty easy. Here is what you do:

Get the camera into "movie mode". Press the mode button, then the info button will take you to movie mode. A little movie camera icon will appear in the top left of the display on top of the camera.
Go to shooting menu 5
Select "time lapse movie"
enable it
set the interval (I used 10 seconds)
set the number of shots (I used 720)
push the red button on top of the camera
you can take a test shot
use the shutter button to start the shooting
use the info button to turn off the screen

Time

At 10 second intervals an hour is 360 shots and will play for 12 seconds
At 5 second intervals an hour is 720 shots and will play for 24 seconds
At 6 second intervals an hour is 600 shots and will play for 20 seconds

This presumes a 30 fps playback rate.

Tips

Make sure your battery is fully charged.
Shoot for longer than you think you should.

My first attempt (successful!) -- clouds

I took the photo from my porch of clouds with the camera on my big tripod and under the protection of the porch since rain was possible.

When I was all done, I removed the CF card and put it into my card reader. Then on my linux system:

cd /run/media/tom/EOS_DIGITAL/DCIM/100CANON$
ls -l
-rwxr-xr-x 1 tom tom 270004912 Mar 24 18:36 581A5975.MP4
cp 581A5975.MP4 /home/tom/clouds.mp4

This is a 270M file -- not the sort of thing I can easily email to people.

So ... let's see it ...

Clouds

Viewing this on linux

file clouds.mp4
clouds.mp4: ISO Media, MP4 v2 [ISO 14496-14]
vlc clouds.mp4
VLC media player 3.0.20 Vetinari (revision 3.0.20-0-g6f0d0ab126b)
[00007fdfdcc10430] avcodec decoder error: cannot start codec (libopenh264)
[00007fdfdcc10430] main decoder error: Codec `h264' (H264 - MPEG-4 AVC (part 10)) is not supported.
su
dnf install openh264
vlc clouds.mp4
[00007f0008001f70] glx gl error: cannot create GLX context

So, I needed to install openh264, but then I run into this "glx" error and vlc just gives me a black screen. I do some searching and read that vlc won't work with Wayland (but might using X11 if I wanted to go through whatever nightmare that might involve).

What does work is just typing this URL into my browser:

file:///home/tom/clouds.mp4

I'll wait for Fedora 40 or 41 to fix the vlc and Wayland problem.

Feedback? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Digital Photography Info / tom@mmto.org