GoPro + CamDo

I knew long before construction began that I wanted time lapse footage to memorialize the build. The question was how, specifically:

  • What camera to use
  • Where to locate the camera, and how to power it
  • What interval (or time delay between frames) to use, and how much card storage would be needed

I’m an avid GoPro user so that was the first option I considered. GoPro’s time lapse mode can be set to a maximum interval of one minute. This would result in 16 seconds of footage per day (assuming an eight-hour day of activity on the site), or 1.3 minutes per week (assuming a five-day work week). From my experience, few people will want to sit through an hour-long home construction video, so time lapse footage taken at one-minute intervals would require significant editing.

Not only is GoPro’s interval too short, it also doesn’t allow the time lapse to be set to daylight hours only, so footage taken at night and during weekends would have to be edited out. My builder tried this on a previous build and said it ended up being a lot of work. The extra, unneeded footage would also use up more battery power and card storage. Clearly, GoPro wasn’t designed for long-term time lapses.

Luckily, an online search led me to CamDo Solutions. CamDo offers a device called Blink that supercharges the GoPro time lapse function. Blink connects to a GoPro and controls when the GoPro takes a time lapse photo. Though its browser-based menu feels a bit outdated (it didn’t have its own app at the time of this writing), Blink can be programmed to almost any interval and can be set to whichever hours in a day and days in a week work happens on site. It can even power down the GoPro when it’s not needed, saving battery power. The company also has a handy time lapse calculator for estimating how long the resulting video will be for a specified interval and project duration, or vice versa.

I couldn’t convince my builder to upgrade his system and use it on my build, so I ended up buying the system myself. (Perhaps the footage will be so good that he’ll want to buy the system from me afterwards.) The package I got included a weather-proof housing, a back-up power pack (which lasts about a week) and a mounting bracket.

We mounted the rig on the temporary utility pole on the site, connected it to a power source and secured it with locks and heavy wire.

I set the interval to nine minutes, 9am to 6pm on weekdays. Here’s a sample. I used Adobe Premiere Elements to stitch the individual frames together.