Do you mean you get too much darkness and too much brightness at the same time? Or it's one or the other? This sounds like basic exposure problems. Just change the aperture and the ISO setting until the picture looks right in the LCD. Don't worry too much about what the histogram shows until you get used to how it works.

@balazer, thank you very much! I didn't know about it.

Hi everybody!

@balazer - You've said: " I would have shot 8-fps in 300% variable mode with a 1/8 s shutter speed".
What would be the GOP then? 3?

TIA

Is it possible to make intervalled stills with GH2 ?

I know this is different from your discussion on frame rates, but can't think where else to post this: In time lapse videos, sometimes you see the sun travelling across the sky - which means its being focussed on the sensor for a long time. Doesn't this damage the sensor? I'm thinking of what magnifying glasses do to leaves in the sunlight...

I took Driftwood Aquamotion v1 and changed the GOP length to 13 frames.

@Dusty42, please see my updated explanation, above. http://personal-view.com/talks/discussion/1559/avchd-1080p-time-lapse#Item_25 The old one was all wrong.

@tida, I think a GOP length of 13 frames (for the 1/2 s shutter setting) is going to be your best bet. You'll get best quality, and really long recording times, like 10 hours in 32 GB. GOP13 here is many times as efficient as GOP1.

This is from Wikipedia..Not sure if this helps but..It explains it much better than I ever could--

"It is also important to consider the relationship between the frame interval and the exposure time. This relationship essentially controls the amount of motion blur present in each frame and it is, in principle, exactly the same as adjusting the shutter angle on a movie camera. This is also known as "Dragging the shutter."

A film camera normally records film at twenty four frames per second. During each 24th of a second the film is actually exposed to light for roughly half the time. The rest of the time it is hidden behind the shutter. Thus exposure time for motion picture film is normally calculated to be one 48th of a second (1/48 second, often rounded to 1/50 second). Adjusting the shutter angle on a film camera (if its design allows) can add or reduce the amount of motion blur by changing the amount of time that the film frame is actually exposed to light.
Blurring vs. exposure times

In time-lapse photography the camera records images at a specific slow interval such as one frame every thirty seconds (1/30 frame/s). The shutter will be open for some portion of that time. In short exposure time-lapse the film is exposed to light for a normal exposure time over an abnormal frame interval. So for example the camera will be set up to expose a frame for 1/50th of a second every 30 seconds. Such a setup will create the effect of an extremely tight shutter angle giving the resulting film a stop-animation or clay-mation quality.

In long exposure time-lapse the exposure time will approximate the effects of a normal shutter angle. Normally this means that the exposure time should be half of the frame interval. Thus a 30 second frame interval should be accompanied by a 15 second exposure time to simulate a normal shutter. The resulting film will appear smooth.

Long exposure time-lapse is less common because it is often difficult to properly expose film at such a long period, especially in daylight situations. A film frame that is exposed for 15 seconds will receive 750 times more light than its 1/50th of a second counterpart. (Thus it will be more than 9 stops over normal exposure.) A scientific grade neutral density filter can be used to alleviate this problem."

@balazer thanks for your great explanations. Avisynth works really well, I let it work via virtualdub.

Did somebody try to lower general bitrates and increase to multiple GOP13 (like GOP26, GOP39 etc.). Would that effect the image quality dramatically?
That would be like going into the opposit direction of cbranding's 44M patch. Maybe you could end up with very long recording times even on small cards and almost no influence of image quality as one ends up with timelapse GOP2, GOP3 etc..

Then it would be only a question of powering the GH2...

@balazer That makes perfect sense. Thanks for the educational and informative explanation!

@KeithLommel, long shutter exposurers require manual focus and manual exposure because automatic focus and automatic exposure rely on sampling the image at regular intervals. Technically I suppose you could have automatic focus and automatic exposure with long exposures/low effective frame rates, but they would be very sluggish.

@chauncy, yes, but a shutter speed of 1/2 second results in one exposure for every 13/23.976 seconds, not for every 1/2 second.

@balazer

I am a nooby on timelapse. I really like your demo. May I ask some questions regarding the frame rate (fps) and shutter speed that you used.

>This particular example was shot on a hacked GH2 in AVCHD 1080p 24-fps mode with the shutter speed set to 1/2 s. That makes the recorded video have 13 frames for each picture taken, for an effective frame rate of 23.976/13, or about 1.84 fps.

I thought shutter speed had nothing to do with the fps. The shutter speed only had effect on exposure - darker or brighter. In another word, how long a frame is exposed. Is my understanding wrong? I could not understanding it from your statement I quoted above. If you shoot at 24-fps and shutter speed at 1/2s, would you not still end up with 24-fps with over exposed (possibly) frames? How would a 1/2s shutter speed give you "13 frames for each picture taken"? Would you mind explain this to me? I need to understand this.

I am looking forward to your answer.

Thanks.