Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up

(This video has been seen already in my other blog. Sorry to those who have already heard this story.)

I sometimes introduce my new gadgets on my other blog by showing them off in YouTube videos. I posted a video of my new coffee roaster as it went through the phases of roasting a batch of coffee. One commenter asked how long it took to roast the coffee. Another suggested I could have had an old movie cliché, such as spinning train wheels or flying calendar pages, show the passage of time.

A few days after I posted that video my intervalometer came in the mail. I knew what I was going to do with it as soon as I figured out how to use it and got some light out in the garden room where I roast my coffee.

I shot a video of the entire roasting process with a clock next to the roaster. This video served many purposes. Among them:

1. I got to show off my newest gadget.
2. I got to show a clock spewing out the passage of time.
3. I got to answer the question of how long it takes to roast coffee.

Coffee roasting, start to finish:


I looked at the timestamps of the segments from the original video and found that from start of the preheat to the end of the cooling was about 25 minutes. So I figured that's how long it would take to roast the batch for this video.

I then needed to come up with a bit of music to accompany the finished video. It needed to be short and evoke caffeinated hyperactivity. Rimsky-Korsikov's "Flight of the Bumblebee" seemed to cover all that. My recording of it lasts a minute and 33 seconds.

I decided to make my video at 24 frames per second.  I needed 93 seconds (the length of the music) at 24 frames/second. That meant that I needed around 2200 frames. I planned on shooting around 1500 seconds of roasting (25 minutes times 60 seconds/minute).

Dividing the 1500 seconds by 2200 frames, I came up with 0.68 second per frame.

I set the intervalometer to have the camera shoot a picture every 0.7 second.

I turned on the intervalometer as the second hand approached the 12 and hit the start button on the roaster when it reached the 12. My hand makes appearances when I dumped the beans into the roaster after the preheat period and when I needed to make adjustments to the heat element and the fan. When the cooling finished and the roaster shut off I let the camera take a few more shots then turned off the intervalometer.


The first five seconds after the title were just five frames at one frame per second. The rest of the video was made of the shots shown at 24 frames per second. The music I chose lasted just the right amount of time.


I had intended to have some time left ticking on the clock after the roaster had come to a full stop. I was going to have the video go back to having the clock tick once per second and have the video to black. But I wasn't paying attention. I let the camera keep taking pictures for a few seconds after the bar stirring the beans in the cooling tray stopped moving. But the roaster's drum was still coasting to a stop. The drum quit spinning just a few seconds before I shut off the camera. Not enough for a fade out. Shoot!


Better, more uniform light would have been nice to have.


I'm happy with this one.