Time lapse recording a 2100 km cycle ride

[EinsteinX]

So I am planning to ride my bicycle from my home all the way across Europe to the home of my girlfriend. This will be a three week 2100 km cycle that I would like to record in time lapse. And for this purpose I am looking for a camera. I quite like Sony's NEX camera's since they are compact, light, but still have a full sized CCD chip on board. I wonder though if they have on board ability to make time lapse pictures.

Therefore my questions to this forum are:
- does anyone know a NEX-like camera that has time lapse ability on board?
- preferable I'd like the camera to be battery powered, not accu powered since I wont always be able to charge it.
- Will such a camera be able to record a full day of cycling (~10 hrs) on one set of batteries?
- Will there be enough storage space on the SD card for about 1000 pictures per day?

Regards, Eins

[SIMON40]

10 hrs video and 1000 pics a day...?? You'd need one heck of a power source AND several BIG storage cards..!

[EinsteinX]

Oh shoot, I made an error. My idea was to cycle about 100 km per day and I wanted to set the camera to take one picture every 10 m. That however would equate to 10000 pics for the 100 km per day (not 1000 pics/day as I thought). After the trip I would edit those 10000 pics per day into a time lapse video. At 25 fps that would compress the 100 km into a 400 second video. And the 21 cycling days into an 8400 second or 140 minute movie. Seems a bit too much to watch.

The reason why I want to take one pic per 10 m is so that the viewer of the video will actually see the landscape change around me. I actually did a similar video once for a 150 km hiking, taking a picture every 200 m. The problem is that you dont really seem to be moving through the landscape as the 200 m interval is too large. The video is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFNZK...SsIxg&index=32

Therefore I was thinking of making the time lapse with 10 m intervals. However, judging my hiking video, one pic every 25 m will already give me an eight times better result than the hiking video. So let me continue calculating with 25 m intervals.

After a Google search I find that an NEX-5N will produce JPEGS of about 4.5 MB to 8 MB. That would require at worst 8 MB x 4000 pics/day = 32.000 MB or 31.25 GB of memory per day. So I will have to use one 32 GB SD per days or a 64 GB card to record two days. That would require me to buy 21 or 11 SD cards for the full trip. At an average price of 30 EUR for a 32 GB card it'll cost me 630 EUR of SD cards. Seems to become a rather expensive holiday, won't you agree?

I do indeed share your doubts about the power source for having the camera on for the 100 km's. I want to cycle light, so I really hope it can stay on on one set of batteries per day. What do you think?

Eins

[SIMON40]

The GoPro camera's seem to be popular in the cycling community.
I'm not sure they're up to the job of what you require,but it might be worth visiting an online cycling blog or the GoPro website.