This is a video that I made while working on a part for my masters project at NCSU. The camera framerate was 1 frame every 3 seconds played back at 12 frames per second. I've found that the most useful setup for time lapse makes use of the "magic arm" produced by manfrotto. The manfrotto arm can be clamped to any solid object (preferably something heavy or bolted down) making it much more reliable when you need to be sure that the camera does not move. It also makes is much easier to move the camera around to get the angle you want. In this case I clamped the camera to a bar on the side of the drill press and on the back of the lathe for the second half of the video.

Luckily there was a plastic shield available that could be set up in front of the camera. I also used a clear filter over the lens just to be sure that no chips bounced over the shield and hit the lens glass.

I think that I higher camera frame rate would have helped when making this video. To be sure that the camera caught everything I was doing, I often had to hold a position and wait for the camera to take a picture. This highlights the challenge of choosing a suitable framerate for recording an event in time lapse. Something like machining a part may take a long time but is composed of a large number of steps that are completed relatively quickly. Using too large a gap between frames may result in the viewer missing steps and making the video hard to follow.