*ETA* if this is not the best forum, would the mods please stick it where it's most appropriate? I apologies if I picked the wrong place.
Hi Folks, I've been doing some reading and I have found several time lapse threads, just perhaps none quite so ambitions as this. I'd like to pick your brain and see if I can get some help 1) determining that this will, in fact, work with my goals in mind and 2) optimal choice of camera for this project.
I work for a small private college in the IT department, and we are looking to make a time-lapse video of a new $14M learning commons that is being built. Construction started about a month ago (they haven't even poured the footings yet) and it is anticipated to run until next august (2013). The powers that be have allocated absolutely ZERO funds for this project, so we are working with just whatever money we can spare out of our own department budget, hopefully just a couple-hundred bucks (max).
I would like to do maybe one photo every 5 minutes or so. We plan to render incremental videos every month or so, maybe a little more frequently, so mini-time lapses with what we have "so far" as we go along. I think over the 15 months of the project, a 5-min interval would give me plenty to work with. I understand an EyeFi SD cards can offload content on the fly and therefore we would not have to change cards out. This is good, and I would hope to incoproate this feature into our set up.
We are in Northwest Iowa. Summers can be 100degrees with 80% humidity, and, conversely, the winters can be -20F with crazy windchills and blizzards.
We have one of
these in our boneyard downstairs. It was used for another construction project about ten years ago. The seals seem decent still, and I think it could work decently as an enclosure. It has a sealed power cord. The interior dimensions are roughly 4.5" wide and 3.25" tall. So might have to look at maybe an elph style camera to run CHDK? But would that survive 15 months of brutalization?
I would genuinely appreciate any and all feedback you might have for me in this regard. I really wanted PR to allocate $1k or so to put together a full DSLR+Intervalometer+ weatherization kit type setup, but it was a complete no-go. Frankly it's ridiculous considering the massive cost of this new building going up by comparison. But such is the life of working at a non-profit.
Thanks in advance for any comments you may have for me!
Matt