Help with time lapse solution using a GoPro

acidrain

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Hi all,

Ok so long story short, I am wanting to do a long time lapse for a job, from start to finish, in Namibia. The expected duration of the job will be 3 days of which the GoPro will be continuously taking photos throughout the duration.

The camera will be mounted on a pole extending 3m outwards from the building approximately 9 floors off the ground so physically getting to the device, without messing with the mounting will be impossible.

Powering it for the duration won't be a problem as I've read the gopro can be powered through USB while taking photos so a long usb connected to a charger is easy enough to overcome this. The problem however is the SD capacity. It is a GoPro3 Silver ( not the 3+ ) which apparently only supports a 32GB card so I will soon run out of space before the time period ( thinking either 1 shot every 30s or 60s, but preferably 30s to create a smoother time lapse ).

Question is, can I use the USB cable to connect to the gopro and copy over the files while it's still taking photo's, thereby freeing up space so it can continue or is there a solution to move the files off the sd card while it is still operating? I would preferably not want to remove the mount because that will disturb the original framing of the video.

Hopefully someone out there has accomplished a time lapse of this extent and can assist.
 
Generally you can't take pictures while accessing the camera from a computer.

However, 3 days, 1 photo per min, 5MB per photo = 21 GB.

If you're making a video, you can even turn down the resolution to 7MP instead of 10, which should bring your file size down enough to be able to take 1 photo every 30 sec.

Edit:
Your night time shots should also be significantly smaller than your day time shots.
 
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