Practical guide / Interval Atlas
Plan a five-day time-lapse without recording every night
Build a practical frame and storage budget for daily sessions, with a worked eight-hour schedule.
Write the real capture schedule
Start with the number of days you will actually record and the hours in each session. Five days at eight hours is 40 active hours, not 120. The calculator handles repeated equal-length sessions. If hours differ, calculate each schedule group separately and add the results.
Translate cadence into frame count
At a 60-second start-to-start interval, an eight-hour session contains 480 capture slots. Five such sessions produce 2,400 frames. Played at 30 fps, those frames last 80 seconds. This describes playback length, not whether the subject motion will look smooth or interesting.
Budget image files before the movie
At an average of 8 MB per capture, the stills occupy 19.2 GB. A 20% allowance raises the working capture budget to 23.04 GB. The exported movie is an additional file and does not replace the original images unless you deliberately discard them. A second full backup needs another copy of the source storage.
Run a short trial before leaving it
Check real image sizes, the interval behavior, power arrangements and how the camera restarts each day. Inspect the trial for missed frames and unwanted exposure changes. Record actual free space after formatting. The arithmetic is a useful checklist, but it cannot verify unattended camera reliability.
Put the method to work
Budget photos, clip duration and storage for a schedule that shoots a fixed number of hours on each active day.
Open the calculator →Before you use the result
Check the measurement units, use the actual materials or equipment in your project, and test a small example. The linked calculator shows its assumptions and provides a worksheet you can keep with your project notes.
These examples were prepared for this site. They are not a report of a laboratory test or a product certification.