Foolography Community

App will not let you set the interval time to an amount less than the shutter speed. For example if I want a 10 second shot with a 1 second interval it is not allowed. The interval must be at least 11 seconds. Not much good for star trails. Please help.

The problem is associated with the time it takes the camera to write the picture to the card. There isn’t really a need to consider this factor since the camera has a buffer and should be able to take the next picture while the file is being written. The best I have been able to achieve is a 3 second gap between 10 second exposures by choosing an interval of 13 seconds using a card that writes at up to 160 MB/second. A 1066x card, UDMA 7.

Hi,

I believe you're misinterpreting "Interval".
Interval is from the start of one exposure until the start of the next one, not the time between the end of the first and start of the second image.
So if you're doing 10s exposures, and you want them to be back to back, you need to set a 10s interval.
However, we require a little bit of time - about one second, so we allow you to only set 11s.

Yes, the cameras have a buffer, but we have noticed that sometimes, something is stopping them from writing all that data while the camera is still taking photos. Giving it that one extra second puts us on the safe side.
Also, the timer of our Unleashed might be just a tiny bit faster than the timer in the camera, so that reduces the risk of any errors related to this.
In our Autoramp algorithms, we require 2 seconds between images, so we can fetch the image, do all the calculations, and set any changes if necessary.

All that said, we recently noticed some problems with very long exposures in a timelapse, that we will be looking at again. (30s exposures with 31s intervals often didn't work under certain conditions)
Maybe in a future app update, we'll change how strict we are about starting a timelapse, so if you want to try doing a 10s interval with 10s exposures, we'll just warn you, but let you try anyway ;-)

just a small note on my last post:

we found the reason for 31s intervals not working when shutterspeed is set to 30s.
This is because the actual shutterspeed of the camera is 32s - no idea why Nikon and Canon both still display it as 30s!?
Same with 15s - that's actually 16s. Which makes total sense, as we should always double the exposure time for each stop, and then the sequence is 1,2,4,8,16,32,... I assume using 15s and 30s was just to make it fit a little better into time intervals we are used to from the rest of the world outside of photography

This means when using a shutterspeed of 30s (or 15s) you have to use an interval of 33s (or 17s respectively) or longer.