Four ways to make a timelapse video: on your phone, with a camera, from a video you already have, or of your computer screen. Plus how to pick the interval.
To make a timelapse video, you capture one frame every few seconds instead of 30 every second, then play those frames back at normal speed. You can do that with a phone's built-in time-lapse mode, a camera on an interval timer, a normal video you speed up afterwards, or an app that captures your computer screen at an interval.
Which one you want depends on what you're pointing at. I'll go through all four, then the one decision that matters in every case: the interval.
The idea behind every timelapse
A normal video records 24 or 30 frames each second and plays them back at the same rate, so one second of video is one second of life.
A timelapse breaks that link. Capture one frame every 2 seconds, play back at 30 frames per second, and each second of video now covers 60 seconds of real time. An hour becomes a minute.
That's the whole trick, and it's one formula:
real time = video length × frame rate × interval
If you'd rather not do it in your head, the time lapse calculator works it out in any direction.
1. On your phone
This is the fastest way to get a timelapse of something in front of you: a sunset, a drawing, a room being tidied.
On an iPhone, Apple's steps are:
- Open Camera.
- Select Time-lapse mode.
- Frame your subject and put the phone on a stable surface or a tripod.
- Tap Record to start, and again to stop.
There's no interval setting. The phone picks it, which is why this works well for casual shots and badly when you need the result to be a specific length.
Most Android camera apps have an equivalent mode, usually under "More" or "Video", and some let you choose the speed. The names differ between manufacturers, so look through the modes in your own camera app.
Two things make or break a phone timelapse. Keep it completely still, because a small nudge becomes a violent jump once it's sped up. And plug it in for anything longer than about half an hour.
2. With a camera
A camera gives you the control a phone doesn't: you choose the interval, and every frame is a full-quality photo.
- Put the camera on a tripod.
- Switch to manual exposure and manual focus, so the brightness and focus don't shift between frames.
- Set the interval timer. Many cameras have one built in; if yours doesn't, an external intervalometer does the same job.
- Shoot, then import the photos into a video editor as an image sequence and export at 24 or 30 fps.
The interval depends on how fast your subject moves. As a starting point, Hyperlapse Photography's guide suggests:
| Subject | Interval |
|---|---|
| Traffic, people | 1–2 seconds |
| Fast-moving clouds | 3–5 seconds |
| Slow clouds | 6–10 seconds |
| Stars | 20 seconds |
3. From a video you already have
If you've already recorded something at normal speed, you can turn it into a timelapse by speeding it up. Any video editor will do it: find the clip's speed setting and raise it.
If you're comfortable in a terminal, ffmpeg does it in one line:
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -filter:v "setpts=PTS/30" -an output.mp4
setpts rewrites each frame's timestamp, so dividing by 30 makes the video 30 times faster. -an drops the audio, which is unusable at that speed anyway.
This works, but it's the wasteful route. You recorded, stored and decoded every frame only to throw most of them away. For a one-off that's fine. If you do it often, I went through the trade-offs in how to speed up a screen recording.
4. Of your computer screen
Coding sessions, design work, a painting in Photoshop or Krita, a Blender render: none of that is in front of a camera. It's on your screen.
You could screen-record the whole session and speed it up, as in method 3. For a three-hour session that means a multi-gigabyte file and a long export. The better way is to capture the screen at an interval from the start.
That's what I built Tau for. It runs on macOS and Windows, and it's a one-time purchase rather than a subscription. The flow is:
- Pick what to record: your screen, a camera, or both at once.
- Set the session length and the interval. The setup screen shows how many frames you'll get and how long the finished video will be, before you start.
- Record. Tau captures a frame at each interval while you work.
- Add overlays if you want them, such as a timer, then export.
The getting started guide walks through each screen, and there are specific guides for coding, art and Blender.
How to pick the interval
Whichever method you use, this is the decision that shapes the result. Work backwards from the video you want:
interval = recording time ÷ (video length × frame rate)
Say you'll work for 2 hours and want a 30-second clip at 30 fps. That's 7,200 seconds ÷ 900 frames = one frame every 8 seconds.
Two rules of thumb:
- Go finer than you think you need. Frames you captured can be thinned out later. Frames you never captured can't be added.
- Decide the length first. A short clip for social media and a ten-minute YouTube video need very different intervals from the same session.
If the result looks jerky, the interval is usually too long for how fast things were changing. I covered the fixes in why is my timelapse choppy, and frame rate in what frame rate for timelapse.
Quick answers
How long is a 30-minute video in time-lapse?
It depends on the interval. At one frame per second and 30 fps playback, 30 minutes becomes 60 seconds. At one frame every 2 seconds it's 30 seconds, and at one every 5 seconds it's 12 seconds.
Can I make a timelapse from a normal video?
Yes. Speed it up in a video editor or with ffmpeg, as in method 3. The result looks the same as an interval capture; it just costs more disk space and export time to get there.
Do I need special software?
Not for a phone or a camera: the phone has a mode for it, and any video editor can assemble a camera's photos. For a computer screen you need something that captures at an interval, or a screen recorder plus an editor to speed the result up.
What frame rate should a timelapse be?
24 or 30 fps for most uses. The frame rate changes how fast the frames play back, not how much time you captured.