NEX-6 Camera applications – Time-Lapse

Using the extra applications with the Sony NEX-6

You can extend the functionality of your Sony NEX6 Interchangeable Lens Digital Camera 16.1MP with 16-50mm Zoom Lens – Black
by purchasing some of the extra applications available from the Sony Play Mobile site. There are also one or two free applications which you can use, such as the one which allows you to use an Android or an iOS device to be a remote controller for the camera. I have downloaded the free applications and I have bought a couple of the paid for applications that I thought looked interesting. One of the paid applications is called Time-lapse and it does what it says on the tin, that is to allow you to capture a set of photographs at intervals and combine them into a movie. I was able to do this with my Canon 600D when I had the free extra application called Magic Lantern. You can use this timelapse application to take pictures of clouds scudding across the sky when you can hardly see that they are moving because they are going so slowly. It can also be interesting to use this timelapse application to shoot a short movie of a scene in a street, especially if you view from high above.

Getting started with using the application Timelapse on the Sony NEX-6

The first thing to do is to get the application onto your camera and to be perfectly honest I am not terribly impressed with how easy it is to buy applications from the Sony application store. I had one or two problems with getting my second purchase from the site even though the first one was easy enough. In the end, to get around the difficulties I had and buy a PlayStation card so that I could put money into a Sony account. I was then able to use that value in the Sony account to buy the applications. The applications tend to be either available for free, £3.99 or £7.99 and the timelapse application was in the higher bracket.

After installing the application on the Sony NEX6 Camera
, about six days later there was an update to it, version 2. If you also have version 1 and you need to upgrade to version 2, you can’t just click on the update button on the website while you have your camera attached. What you have to do first of all is to go into the Application Manager on the camera and to delete the previous version and then click on install. The USB connection to the camera and the installation process seems a little bit flaky at times and there is a possibility you may need to try more than once to get it to work.

NEX-6 Timelapse

Themes within the Timelapse application on Sony NEX-6

The themes are really just presets and they are a good start for your first recording of timelapse movies. I would recommend that you try out the presets which suits best the movie that you are making. Apart from the standard timelapse preset there is one for a night scene, another for sunrise or sunset, miniature, night sky, cloudy sky and then there is the one called custom. If you start off by using the standard setting you can take those initial settings and change some of the parameters within that. From the information page that is for the theme you can go to the options and for each theme there are five pages of options to play with. In some themes some options can’t be changed. There is a timer which you can turn on or off, if you have it on then you have a two second self timer. Within the standard theme settings on page 2 you can change the movie size and go for either 1080p or 720p. On page 3 you can change the focus mode and the focus area and you can also change the exposure compensation.

Sony NEX6 timelapse 2
You can also go into the application settings for the theme so that you can sort out exactly what you want for the time lapse in terms of frames per second, interval, the number of shots and in some of the themes you can choose the automatic exposure, whether it should have tracking or not. It is in this area that you will see how long it is going to take for you to record the final length of your video interactively as you change the length of the interval and the number of the shots. For a standard timelapse the default is 24 frames per second with a two second interval and 240 shots giving you a final length of video of 10 seconds and it tells you that it’s going to take eight minutes to complete this process. If you make any changes to the default settings, don’t worry as there is a option for you to reset to the default on the Sony NEX6 Interchangeable Lens Digital Camera 16.1MP with 16-50mm Zoom Lens – Black
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NEW KIT ALERT

I just bought a DURAGADGET Double Zip Black And Red Protective Case so that I can keep the camera safe in my back pack. It is a bit more bulky but at least it isn’t going to get scratched.