From the 14th floor of Century Hotel in Sagami-Ono, Japan 5/25/2011 using a Canon T2i (AKA 550D) and a May 17, 2011 build of Magic Lantern (magiclantern-2011May17.550d.fw109.alex).
Canon firmware version 1.0.9.
Shutter speed: 1/30 (minimum shutter speed for video mode)
Aperature: f3.5
Focal length: 28mm
Lens: Canon 28-125mm f3.5-5.6 IS
ISO: 800
Video mode
Manual exposure control
Magic Lantern settings:
Silent Picture: Single
Invalometer: On,NoWait
Take a pic every: 1s
Display: Turn off when idle [under LiveV menu]
Bit Rate: Qscale +16
I started recording a 1080P video and then enabled the intervalometer from the ML menu and closed the ML menu. After a minute the LCD turned off due to the "turn off when idle" setting to save battery. I left it for about 45 minutes. The video stopped recording automatically after 29 minutes and 59 seconds even though the file size did not reach 4GB. After that, silent pictures continued but at a reduced resolution.
Bit rate was set to Qscale +16 to increase the length of time a video can record before reaching 4GB. The resulting video bitrate was 0.2716 Mbps. Total video file size was 912MB. From what I've read, reducing the bitrate of the video does not affect the silent picture quality, and that seems to be true. The video has very bad compression artifacts which are very obvious as soon as you open it, but the time lapse images look normal. The battery was warm at the end.
The individual silent pictures were 1720x974 resolution, almost full HD 1080P. I up-resed them to 1080P by selecting "fit to frame size" in Adobe Premiere. I did not include the reduced resolution images in this video. Reduced resolution images are 1056x704 (not 16:9 widescren ratio). Even though I specified to take one frame per second, the camera/class 6 SanDisk memory card apparently could not keep up. If it is not done recording the image and writing it to the memory card, it will skip the next image. I got 1096 images in 1800 seconds. It took 30-40 images per minute.
The .422 files were about 3.2MB each and once they were converted to .jpg they were around 480kB each.
The image is blurry in the upper left corner because this lens sucks and I was shooting through a window. This video is maybe not the best to judge the quality that is achievable using this time lapse method.
