I’ve just upgraded from the original iPhone 3G to the iPhone 4 and actually have a useable phone again, so I didn’t mess around in trying out the speedier processor with some new apps. iTimelapse has been out for a while but it is a pretty cool wee app that does what it says on the tin, that is, create time lapses on the iPhone.
There are loads of options while taking images such as shot frequency, amount and resolution, but it is quite annoying that the preset resolutions are not in the standard 16:9 aspect ratio. This just makes the workflow for playing and uploading time-lapses not as smooth as it could be.
Creating a timeplase with iTimelapse is fairly straight forward. You start by creating a new project, entering in your preferred settings and then starting the image capture. Once the images have been captured you need to render them. iTimelapse presents you with lots of different options at this stage as well including fps, resolution, and the option to add a soundtrack from your music library. I found that the 900×1200 preset is the max you can go on the iPhone 4 without a slowdown in playback, and you have to go down to the 600×800 resolution to be able to send the rendered videos to your camera roll and export them to your computer.
Update: I’ve just figured out that you can export the full resolution photos by selecting ‘edit frames’ in the current project and then ‘export frames’. The frames will be sent to your camera roll where you can import them to you computer using image capture, and then open them as an image sequence in Quicktime 7.
The other option to get the rendered time lapses from you phone is to upload them to the internet. iTimelapse can do this for you with options to login to YouTube, Facebook, and Vimeo accounts.
All in all iTimelapse is a pretty cool app and seems to have most of the features you would look for. If the standard resolutions could editable, or set to a 16:9 aspect ratio it would make the process of sharing the created videos a better experience.
See some examples in my portfolio section
