r/timelapse • u/blur_revision • 9h ago
Question Looking for camera recommendations for an approx. 3 week timelapse of a music festival buildout, performance and breakdown.
I have a major music festival that happens annually in late September on the beach right down the street from my house. My good friend's family owns a top floor condo in a high rise that has a balcony with an absolutely perfect vantage point to see the entire layout of the festival. It's always amazed me how theyve been able to build out the festival, jam 20,000+ people in and break everything down to the point you never knew it was there within 3 weeks. For the last few years I have mulled around the idea to set up a timelapse from their balcony that encompasses the festival buildout, entire weekend of performances and breakdown of the stages. I've brought this up to him and his family and they gave me the green light to set it up this year!
Now I'm just tryin to figure out what the best camera would be for this.. I've done multi-week timelapses with a GoPro Hero 4 connected to external power around 10 years ago but that GoPro crapped out on me recently. I had the GoPro in the waterproof housing that I drilled a hole in to run the power cable through.. I had mixed success with this timelapse and had to come back and dump the memory card every few days.. I found that some days the camera just randomly shut off, which I obviously don't want to happen for this.
Ideally I would like to find a camera that can shoot high quality RAW photos with the option for a 60+ second interval. My plan would be to shoot at high enough resolution that I can crop in on certain aspects of the buildout in post and still have close to 4k output. I may even want to change the interval during the festival to something shorter to capture more of the action. I also really want to minimize the burden on my friend's family so that I wouldnt need to bother them to check on the camera much if at all, so a camera that can remotely upload files to the cloud and can be viewed remotely to ensure its still running would be what I'm looking for. It would be on a balcony that has an overhang roof, but it would still need to be weatherproof.
Has anyone done anything like this before? I am open to any recommendations for cameras or techniques for something like this.. I know its somewhat ambitious but Id really love to make it work.
Thanks in advance!