Burningman 2007 Time-Lapse

Time Lapse Video of the 2007 Burning Man festival as viewed from the Block Rock Solar "Powertainer". Be sure and check out the Sequel video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4FxBqHGGq4

Interesting note: You can actually see the Crude Awakening Oil Derrick go up even though it's about 3/4 mile away! There is a brilliant flash that illuminates the scene. Here is a high resolution still: http://mindfart.com/pic/?crudeawakeningshadow

Background:
I was originally asked by Tom Price to do this timelapse, and I thought it was an awesome idea. It's been done before by the Folding-Time guys, but they didn't set up this year. The images were captured by a Canon G3 mounted in a weatherproof housing of my own design up on a 20 foot pole next to the Powertainer. There were 18,486 images shot at 2272x1704 which is almost 4 megapixels each. Some of the full-size stills are stunning! The camera was controlled by a custom Daemon I wrote using the Gphoto library, which ran on the Powertainer's Slackware linux system and the images were stored full-size on a hard drive. After the event, I ran another piece of code that downsampled the images to 640x480 then composed them at 30fps into a MPEG-4 video. My friend Tom Sepe added the Music and Titles for me and Voila! I hope to make a more portable rig for future use incorporating an embedded linux system and flash memory. Contact me for more information, to hire me for interesting geekery, or just to geek out. =)

Category:

Travel & Events

Tags:

• Burningman
• Burning
• Man
• Timelapse
• Peef
• Powertainer
• Black
• Rock
• Solar
• BRC
• Linux
• Gphoto
• slackware

[joshua804]

how did you store all of the images how big of a harddrive or what did you use

[peefpeef]

It was stored on a ruggedized industrial computer running slackware Linux. It has a 60g drive inside.

[starlite528]

I think you should have kept the original full size images, or did you?  With them you can make 720p, 1080p, 2K, and maybe even 4K HD video.

I prefer using a Digital still camera though, like my Canon Rebel XT. More megapixels = power for the future!

[peefpeef]

I did keep all 18,476 images. If you looked at "about this video" at the top right, you would have read that the images WERE shot with a 4 megapixel resolution (2272x1704). I have had no significant reason to produce a video at higher resolutions, but I may do so at some point.

-Phil

[voznow7]

Does that dust kill the party or does it look thicker than it is.

[Dairokan]

In the end it's up to you and how much you want to go. If you can't figure out how to pay $200-250 for a ticket well that's on you. If you think about it if you just put one dollar a day into a piggy bank and saved it for a year you'd have more than you'd need for the ticket.

Also $250 dollars is not a lot of money for an event that goes on for 1 week and has as much infrastructure as this one does.

[Craigkc]

Wow, you captured the famous arson of the man at 3am on Tuesday morning @3:56 !!!

[bymacorg18]

Nice time-lapse movie! smooth! Do you know you can make time-lpase movies with any camera with this device: (copy address to browser): tempusALL.bymac.org

Works with ANY camera! cool :P

[petephuduh]

captivating timelapse must tell a story. a static wide angle shot is very generic, and shows very little of the experience. your time would be much better utilized to personalize your footage to document a specific project rather than a wide angle soulless capture.

[ew1951]

Oh man! This was one well-made video and really fun to watch. Plus has great info on the description. Thanks for making and posting this.

[bbYd011]

Thanks for sharing this, what a great contribution! Was awesome to see my first year in fast forward and cool to see the Man burning on the first night, I totally missed it happening and though it was a big joke when I heard people talking about it the next day...

[mflevrn]

mynameiszee: OneManBanjo

[albatros777]

Depends on how bad it gets. But you generally wear a face scarf or respirator for when that happens.