Bad timelapse footage ruined more builds than I care to count before I got this right. The problems were always the same: flickering light, inconsistent framing when the gantry vibrated, and footage that looked great in the preview and terrible in the edit. Here’s what I use now.

Camera and Mount

I’m running a GoPro Hero 12 Black in TimeWarp mode for moving builds, and a Raspberry Pi + camera module for long overnight prints where I want interval control. The Pi setup is way more flexible — you can trigger on layer change via OctoPrint and get perfectly consistent framing regardless of print time.

Mount stability is everything. I designed and printed a custom arm that clamps to the printer frame and has a ball-head mount for angle adjustment. The key is rigidity — any flex in the mount shows up in the final video as a periodic wobble that’s impossible to fix in post.

Lighting

Consistent lighting is more important than good lighting. I use two LED panels on dimmers positioned at 45 degrees to the bed, set once and never touched during a print. The panels are daylight-balanced at 5600K. If your light source shifts colour temperature during a long print (like a window does), the timelapse will have a colour drift that looks bad.

I also run a strip of diffused LED tape around the inside of the printer enclosure for ambient fill — it kills harsh shadows from the main panels and makes the layer lines look more three-dimensional in the final footage.

Capture Settings

For the GoPro: 4K, 60fps for the source, exported at 4K/30fps. The extra frames give you smoother slow-motion in editing when you want to linger on a detail. For the Pi: 2592×1944 at one frame per layer change, assembled in ffmpeg at 30fps. That gives roughly one second of video per thirty layers.