What's a "DSC" camera please?

Digital Stills Camera.

I forgot to say - you _can_ just record an hour or 90mins of DV and then
speed it up in your editing software, but that will rewuire you to change
the tapes 6-8 times in your camera - and not move it while the change is
taking place! With 130GB of HDD free you can record 10 hours direct to PC
and speed it up the same way. You'll probably have to speed up to your
timelapse file, then delete the capture, on a daily basis.


...Where can i find "Krinnikam" also?

via http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/krinnicam/ but bear in mind - it's
for Nikon cameras only. You'll need to find an equivalent for Panasonic
FZ20.

So - if i can try to understand what you are saying - is to shoot using
stills (I have a Panasonic FZ20 FWIW) and simply add the stills together
to make a continuous 'film' rather than actual video?

Exactly right. It looks like your camera has timelapse capabilites built-in,
but I can only find the dutch manual so I'm not sure how you do it.


I have the right software to do this (patch all the stills together), in
fact i have a selection, from Avid Xpress down to Premiere Elements, so
that won't be an issue.

You can do it with all sorts of freeware. I'm sure you can concatenate
images together using VirtualDub (although I don't know the syntax).

When I was doing it (using MediaStudio Pro) I created a colour clip the same
dimensions as my still image, then stretched it on the timeline and saved it
as a image sequence to match the number of frames shot by the camera. Then,
I just replaced the JPEGs created by the editor with the ones I'd shot with
the camera. Took about 30 seconds to turn a long list of stills into a
"video file".


other advice:
Get the camera on a tripod and don't touch it while it's shooting.
By all means change position at lunchtime or from one day to the next, to
make the edit more interesting. Note that an eight-hour day with a picture
shot every two seconds will last 9m36s (PAL)
Don't bother trying to fix a constant manual exposure unless you're
shooting more than once every five seconds - the conditions during the day
will change enough to make it "flicker" anyway, you might as well let the
camera decide what's best.