Timelapse photography is a shooting technology that compresses the process of minutes, hours or even days into a shorter period of time and plays it as a video.
In the Bambu Studio, if you enable timelapse, a timelapse video will be generated for each print. After each layer is printed, a snapshot is taken by the chamber camera. All of these snapshots are composed into a timelapse video when printing completes.
There are two modes of timelapse: smooth mode and traditional mode. For different printers, there will be some differences in the action of shooting time-lapse photography, which is described as follows.
Smooth mode: the tool head will move to the excess chute after each layer is printed and then take a snapshot. Since the melted filament may leak from the nozzle during the process of taking the snapshot, a prime tower is required in this mode. So a prime tower will be automatically generated if there is no prime tower on the build plate. It will reuse the existing prime tower if there is already a prime tower on the plate. In this mode, the toolhead in the video always stays in a fixed position, so the timelapse video looks very smooth.
Traditional mode: It takes a snapshot directly after each layer is printed, and the tool head does not move to the excess chute, so there is no need for the prime tower in this mode. In time-lapse photography videos, the tool head always stays above the printed model.
The X1 and P1 series printers only move the heat bed up and down when printing, and it change its position in the Z direction by moving the heat bed. Due to the different structure, the A1 series printer changes its position in the Y-axis direction by moving the heat bed back and forth, so the heat bed moves continuously in the horizontal direction during the printing process.
When shooting the time-lapse video, it is necessary to keep the horizontal position of the heat bed fixed and only change the position in the Z direction. However, the A1 series printer's heat bed was constantly moving during printing, causing the model to move horizontally as well. So, to successfully shoot time-lapse videos, the A1 series printer moves the heat bed to a fixed position and the nozzle to the purge wiper before each shooting then moves them back above the model to continue printing. Whether it is the traditional mode or smooth mode time-lapse photography, it will move the heat bed and tool head to a fixed position before taking the photo. You can see the moving path to the purge wiper in the traveling path previewed after slicing (see below), but if you do not enable the time-lapse feature before sending the print job, these moves will not be executed during the actual print process.
Traditional mode: During the printing process, due to the leakage caused by the pause when taking the snapshot, the traditional mode of time-lapse photography does not have a prime tower to absorb this flaw, affecting the printing quality. So our strategy is to print defects into the infill as much as possible to ensure surface quality, but if the model has no infill area in this layer, defects are inevitable. In this case, it is not recommended to enable time-lapse photography in traditional mode but to use smooth mode. You will also receive a prompt before sending the print job.
Smooth mode: After selecting smooth mode time-lapse photography, a prime tower will be automatically generated by default. During the printing process, after pausing to take photos, the nozzle will print on the prime tower first, and then continue to print on the model, so that the leakage defects caused by the pause are absorbed by the prime tower.
Below is a comparison of print quality between traditional time-lapse and smooth mode time-lapse for an unfilled model:
In the menu bar of the slicer, under the "Other" option, select the mode of "Time-lapse Photography".
When you select Smooth mode, make sure to enable the prime tower (this feature is turned on by default), as we need the prime tower to clean the nozzle.
Before sending the print job, be sure an SD card with sufficient space is inserted into the printer and check the “Timelapse” option:
After printing, the generated time-lapse video will be stored in the printer's SD card. You can find time-lapse photography video files in the "timelapse" folder on your SD card:
In Bambu Studio, you can also download time-lapse video files from the "Device" - "MicroSD Card" page: