Time-lapse recording captures frames at long intervals and plays them back quickly, so a week of activity becomes a short video. It suits construction progress, site monitoring and long-term trends, and it is not a substitute for continuous recording where individual events must be reviewed.
Time lapse trades detail for overview. It is excellent for watching a building rise and poor for establishing what happened at a gate on a Tuesday afternoon.
How the interval works
A frame every few seconds to a few minutes reduces storage enormously, and playback speed determines what the eye can follow. An interval longer than the activity being studied will miss the activity entirely.
Pairing with continuous video
Many systems record continuously and produce a time-lapse stream from the same footage. Where a camera exists only for time lapse, add continuous coverage at the entrances that matter.