Tx2 once wrote in .. .

we have a massive new building development going into our college, and i
would like to film it in timelapse.

I am thus looking for a MiniDV camera that will allow me to achieve this
with simplicity and at relatively low cost (sub £1000)

Any ideas?

Funnily enough, I've been working on just such a project for capturing
metal melting in a furnace.

I set up a Linux system with a Hauppauge PVR150 TV capture card and took
a composite video feed from a cheap camcorder. I captured one jpeg frame
every 30 seconds using ffmpeg with a sequential file name.

Every so often, I used mencoder (part of the mplayer suite) to recombine
the jpg images into an mpeg.

I've also done the same on Linux using a DLink DCS900 network webcam and
a little script using wget to drag the jpg images off the camera run via
a cron (scheduled batch) job. The same mencoder run would combine these
into an mpeg.

This is all standard Linux distribution stuff and there's loads of
information on google.

For what you want, I'd be tempted to go down the DSC900 route for around
£100 or so, simply because being network based, the camera is much more
stable over a longer period of time (I was getting memory leaks with
ffmpeg after a couple of days).

Other than that, both methods work a treat and it doesn't cost a lot to
do.

--
David Morris