The 2.3 release of Magic Lantern is full of surprises. My most recent discovery: beautiful 2 frames-per-second time lapses, no post-processing required. This is an otherwise impossible frame rate to obtain with my Canon 60D, because even with a fast card it’s impossible to sustain more than 1 frame of shooting per second for more than a few frames in burst mode. For relatively fast-moving action such as storm clouds, sailboats, or to moving cars, 2 frames per second is a sweet spot.

Yesterday morning I had to drive across town at 5:30am to scout a location for an upcoming shoot. To test out the 2fps feature, I sat the camera on the dash of my car on a coat, and let it run. The results were pretty shaky, but promising.

This morning I took a more polished stab at it. This time, I triangulated the camera to my car hood using MicroGrip heads with 3/8 rods, combined with parts from a MiniGrip mounting kit that I picked up at Glazers over the weekend.

The results are smoothest where the highway was smooth. Unfortunately the road is quite rough on the stretch of 99 going past the city skyline. The new tunnel will no doubt be smoother when it’s completed in a few years, and will an exciting (but claustrophobic) place to shoot this kind of footage.

The documentation for using the FPS Override on Magic Lantern is pretty good (see User Guide, page 2). I used the Optimize for Low Light setting, and I’m looking forward to trying out an even slower frame rate such as 1fps using ND filter during daylight driving.