Most of it was shot with a Panasonic Tm700 and Pan. 0.67x Wide Angle lens in 1-second time lapse mode, which is built-in to the camera and is saved in the same format as 1080i.
The clips where people are motion-blurred was shot with a Nikon D300 SLR and the 18-200 lens at 18mm at F22 which gave me 2 to 5 second exposures. The D300 has a built-in "time lapse" function as well.
I recently bought a Canon SX200 point and shoot because you can put CHDK (canon hack development kit) on it, which allows you to script picture taking. I currently have it set to take pictures Monday through Friday from 6am to 10am to capture sunrises over Minneapolis from my cube on the 9th floor. So I'm sure you'll see some of those, as well as thunderstorms rolling in, in the future.
I used yawcam (yet another webcam program) to stitch the jpgs into a mov. It doesn't render anything, because it will convert a thousand jpegs into a quicktime mov in about 2 seconds. So I set the SLR resolution to small (1400 vertical resolution)
FYI, out of curiosity I tried stitching full-size 12MP jpegs (HD format: 3020P!) and PD9 was able to import them!
That means you can crop 2/3 of the image and still be optically full 1080P which is quite nice. None of these zoo clips were shot that way though.
As for the panning, it's just the power-tool crop feature. Select the area you want to start with (left half) then at the end select the area you want to end with (right half). When you play it, it appears to be panning and or zooming. Having a wide angle lens and a camera with good resolution helps. However I'm willing to bet most people on youtube don't even bother to watch HD, and you would never notice any magnification artifacts at 480P unless you zoomed really far in.
Using a 12 megapixel movie you could zoom REALLY far in software without any artifacting. (needs lots of RAM)
I saved as mpeg-4 and uploaded to youtube.
One last note: Youtube supports resolutions up to 4000P so you can actually upload those 12mp jpeg mov files directly to youtube. You'll get an option above 1080 that says "original format" but you can't zoom in and it scales it to your screen. So unless you have a really high-res monitor it doesn't buy you much.
It is the Apple Valley Zoo in Minnesota.
This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at Apr 24. 2011 12:37