Brooklyn Snow Storm Time Lapse

This starts yesterday afternoon, and goes through late morning today.

Update on Sunday, December 20, 2009 at 06:43PM by John Huntington

Welcome Gothamist and Severe Studios readers!

Update on Monday, December 21, 2009 at 12:31AM by John Huntington

As of midnight NYC time, there have been almost 1600 unique visitors here, and over 4200 views of the video!

Update on Tuesday, December 22, 2009 at 10:10AM by John Huntington

Wow, while I was at two parties (one my own) yesterday and doing some christmas shopping, I started getting emails from friends in London and Las Vegas who had seen the video!  It made it onto Huffington Post, and even Gawker!

And WCBS TV 2 here in NYC contacted me yesterday and they aired it on the 6pm news!

As of this writing, the video has more than 28,000 views, and this page has had more than 3,000 unique visitors!  That's in about two days, and is almost equal to my Seeing Sound Waves video which is now up to 35,000 views.

Update on Tuesday, December 22, 2009 at 06:25PM by John Huntington

33,000 views!

Update on Tuesday, December 29, 2009 at 01:58PM by John Huntington

Wow, 45,000 views!

Update on Thursday, January 7, 2010 at 09:38PM by John Huntington

"Rickey Yaneza" emailed in and asked how I shot this time lapse.  I've done a lot of experimenting, and have come up with the following method:

• I shoot individual medium size JPG files on two different cameras.  I let the camera auto-expose, but I set the focus manually--otherwise, there are weird image size changes that come up. I have a Nikon P6000 which has a built in interval timer when shooting in "P" mode.  The only problem with this unit is that its minimum shooting interval is 30 seconds, which is too long for things like thunderstorm development.  I also have a D90 and use a separate intervalometer for that, but I just bought it a few months ago and haven't had time to shoot any storms with it.
• I take the individual frames and assemble them using a program called Handy AVI and using the PIC Video M-JPEG encoder.
• This creates a large but very high quality file, which oftens looks "steppy".  I then open the file in Quicktime Pro and then save that using Quicktime Pro's H.264 encoder.
• For this video, I then used Windows Movie Maker to add the titles and posted it to Vimeo.

I've arrived at this process after a lot of experimentation, but this is WAY too complicated; if anyone has any suggestions to streamline it, let me know.

Comments

[Dan]

Absolutely AMAZING!! Fantastic work :)

[Matt G]

Cool stuff. I caught your time lapse on gothamist.com also!

[DollinNYC]

Thank you for sharing this! Seen on Gothamist.

[daniel andrade]

amazing!! great job :)
miss the snow! :~

[NYC-T]

I hope you continued filming, so we can see the time lapse of the gradual and painful melting/ploughing process!

[John Huntington]

NYC-T: I actually tried that last time, (see:http://www.controlgeek.net/blog/2009/3/2/brooklyn-snow-storm-time-lapse.html).

But it took days and days, and had too many problems with sun glare, etc etc.

Thanks for commenting!

John

[Alan Abbey]

A former and native Brooklynite watched this fondly. I loved watching the time-lapse people come out and shovel their stoops. It sure looked easier than I am sure it was for them.

Not much snow where I live now (Jerusalem, Israel).

Global warming? :)

[James]

Thank you for the time lapse video of the recent snow storm in Brooklyn. I shared it with over 500 people on Facebook and received several positive comments. Merry Christmas!

James Eddy
Morgantown, WV

[Amy Huntington]

I loved watching this video, being an ex-Brooklynite living in France's Loire Valley. Love your blue balcony-Christmas-tree too.