With iOS 8, your time-lapse video will never be over 40 seconds

In what can be called as the most hectic time for Apple, iOS 8 was released to the public amongst much fanfare and one feature that is captivating the masses is time lapse. Going by the definition of time lapse over the Internet, it can be defined as:

A photographic technique that captures frames at set intervals for an event that takes place slowly over time.

To take a time-lapse video, just open the camera app and slide your finger from left to right to change the capturing mode to time lapse. All you now need to do is place the phone at a convenient position and let the app do its magic.

While its fun to capture and view videos that seem to be running in fast forward mode, you will never get bored as the video will only last for a maximum period of somewhere around 40 seconds. Why is it so? Well, Apple believes that people’s attention span is decreasing and users might not want to watch long videos.

The company behind the tripod stand for smartphones has revealed how the time-lapse feature in iOS 8 actually works. They claim that Apple uses a technology called ‘dynamically selected intervals’ that doubles the speed of the time-lapse video and halves the images taken per second as the recording duration of the video is doubled.

The following table probably explains it better:

Image Courtesy: Studio Neat

Simply put, if you take a 5 minutes video or 10, the resulting time-lapse video will only be around 20 seconds. As the recording length increases, the app will automatically switch frame rates and drop frames from previously recorded sections to match.

Time-lapse video recorded over a period of 5 minutes, which resulted in a 20 seconds video at 30 frames per second.

This is a time-lapse video recorded over a period of 40 minutes, also resulting in a 20 seconds video at 30 frames per second but 8 times faster than the previous video. For comparison, notice the speed at which the clouds are moving.