Time-Lapse Interval & Clip Calculator

This is the arithmetic, not the shoot. It assumes the camera keeps up with your interval — a long exposure or a slow card can push the real interval out — and it says nothing about flicker, which is the thing that actually ruins time-lapses and comes from the aperture blades landing differently between frames. Nothing is uploaded.

How fast time runs is the interval times the frame rate — both of them

A 2-second interval at 24 fps compresses real time 48 times, so an hour of shooting becomes 75 seconds of clip. Change nothing but the frame rate and the answer changes with it: the very same frames at 30 fps run 60× faster than life and the hour becomes 60 seconds. The interval gets all the attention because it is the thing you set on the camera, and it is only half the answer.

Halving the interval doubles the clip and doubles the frames, for exactly the same time stood in a field. And at the far end, a 30-second interval compresses 720× and leaves 5 seconds of an entire hour.

And n frames span n − 1 intervals, not n

The camera fires at the start as well as the end, so a sequence of n frames straddles n − 1 gaps. Two frames two seconds apart span two seconds, not four. The error is always exactly one interval, so it shrinks as a proportion the longer you shoot and never actually goes away — which matters not at all until you plan backwards from a wanted clip and come up a frame short of the run time you budgeted for.

Planning the other way round is where the real numbers bite. A ten-second clip at 24 fps needs 240 frames, which at a two-second interval is 8 minutes of shooting and 5.9 GB of card. A single minute of finished clip takes 48 minutes and 35 GB.