A week or so ago, I bought a cheapo remote electronic timer for my Canon Rebel XTi from eBay as a device to play around with creating animations. It was about $15, shipping included, so if it didn’t work or failed miserably, it wasn’t much of a loss. It is, essentially, a knock-off of Canon’s Timer Remote Controller TC-80N3 which, even at B&H, is $136, about ten times more. (Love you and your gear, Canon, but come on.)

The no-name (literally) timer has two modes, in essence. Firstly, you can use it as a remote control to take photos instead of pressing the camera’s shutter button. It plugs in the side of the camera and has its own shutter button. This button can be locked open for those fancy night-time shots (aka, BULB mode). So it’s great for those shots where you have the camera on a tripod and are taking a long exposure – you run less of a risk of jogging the camera.

Secondly, and more interestingly, it can operate in timer mode. Essentially you program in a delay to start shooting, a long-exposure time (you can set this to zero to allow the camera to decide), an interval between shots, and the number of shots to take. Hit the start button and the timer takes over, taking the number of shots you specified with the required exposure times, intervals, and initial delay. Great for taking a series of astronomy pictures: set up your camera on a tripod, program the device, plug it in, then go inside and have a cuppa to warm up.

But that’s not what I bought it for. I bought it to play around with animations. For a quick experiment this lunchtime, I programmed it to snap shots every 10 seconds, and then moved pentomino pieces step by step in the field of view so that they “solved” themselves. I imported the 70-odd shots into Camtasia (I have a license from work) and created this YouTube video.

All right, I admit, Pixar are not going to come calling. It was a definite experiment. Lessons I learned were as follows:

• Set the camera to its lowest resolution. Using RAW is a waste of space on the card for this kind of work. Think about it like this: to get 24 fps, you’ll be taking 1440 pictures for every minute of animation. Unless you like downloading images from your storage card or you are trying to impress the folks at Pixar, stick to a low resolution. For my 8GB CF card (the maximum the XTi will take), that’s 5000 photos at the lowest resolution (1936 × 1288 pixels) – still higher than 1080p.
• Pay more attention to the view. I had the camera at an angle: it would have been much better had I had the camera pointing vertically downwards. You can also see quite clearly that I didn’t have the finishing position in the center of the frame. Hello? Is this amateur hour?
• Use manual focus not automatic focus. I was a little slow at getting my hand out of the way as I advanced the pieces and you can see the camera had focused on something else in a couple of frames. (The timer “half-presses” the shutter button 2 seconds before taking the shot, to allow the autofocus to do its work.)
• TechSmith’s Camtasia is perhaps not the best program for creating a video from a set of frames. When importing a set of images like this, all you can really do is set the default duration that each image shows (I used 0.2 seconds to make 5 fps). If you want to do something fancier, you’re out of luck. I should research a better (simpler?) program.
• Don’t be afraid to move the items a smaller distance for each frame. That also means take more frames. With setup and the 70 shots, it took about 20 minutes to take the pictures. With about 10 minutes processing time, that was about all I could afford during lunch. With a weekend doing this, I could get a smoother flow.
• Doing animation of plastic pieces on a smooth polished table top is just frustrating. Things slide way too easily. Grrr.
• Yeah, the timer isn’t needed. I could quite as easily shot the pictures one by one manually. Still undecided as to whether the timer helped or hindered. I used an interval of 10 seconds so I didn’t feel rushed, and it was fine. I also felt I could just concentrate on the moving the pieces, rather than move a piece, take a photo, rinse, repeat.

But, nevertheless, I’m encouraged by it. I’ll continue playing.

The suggestion came from the top: “how about an article on HD video, HD TVs and all that?” When you get those kinds of suggestions, you don’t raise trivial issues like the fact you don’t even have a TV, let alone an HD TV. You File New in Word and get to work.

Yep, it’s true. We don’t have a telly. It goes back to the days when I first came to live in the States in 1993. I thought I’d only be here a couple of years. I was still paying the mortgage on my flat in London, so I wanted to save up and not blow it on an electronic behemoth that I couldn’t ship back (it wouldn’t have worked – different voltage) nor on the cable subscription to feed it. So, no TV in the Bucknall bachelor pad. Then when I started going out with Donna and it was obvious I was going to stay in the US, she was studying law for a JD and definitely didn’t want a TV. That absence has not made the heart grow fonder: nowadays it’s much easier to watch TV drama via Netflix or Amazon.

Nevertheless, writing about high definition video was quite fun in the end. I actually learned a lot about the whole television process, especially as it’s so different between the UK and the US. There were topics like interlacing, telecine, blur, bilinear interpolation, upscaling, and so on, to research and write up. And I’ll admit it feels good that I can now spot the comb effect from progressive scan on older shows converted to DVD and furthermore explain why it happens. Geek.

All in all, a great little article, even if I say so myself. I think the man on high was pleased with it too.

This article first appeared in issue 303, January 2011.

You can read the PDF here.

(I write a monthly column for PCPlus, a computer news-views-n-reviews magazine in the UK (actually there are thirteen issues a year — there's an Xmas issue as well — so it's a bit more than monthly). The column is called Theory Workshop and appears in the Make It section of the magazine. When I signed up, my editor and the magazine were gracious enough to allow me to reprint the articles here after say a year or so.)