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.
¶ 1. Introduction
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 with 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.
In smooth mode, the toolhead 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 a snapshot, a prime tower is required for nozzle priming in smooth mode. So a prime tower will be automatically generated if there is no prime tower on the heat bed. And it will reuse the existing prime tower if there is already a prime tower on the heat bed. In this mode, the toolhead in the video always stays in a fixed position, so the timelapse video looks very smooth.
In traditional mode, the toolhead will not move to the excess chute when taking a snapshot. So in this mode, a prime tower is not required, but the toolhead is always on the printed model in timelapse video.
¶ 2. How to enable timelapse
In the slicer menu, under "Others", select the "timelapse" mode.
If you want to enable timelapse, you could set timelapse to smooth mode or traditional mode. You should make sure the prime tower is enabled when you choose smooth mode, because it needs to use prime tower for nozzle priming.
Be sure an SD card with sufficient space is inserted into the printer before starting the print.
¶ 3. Traditional timelapse of A1 mini
A1 mini machine:
The A1 mini machine changes the position in the y-axis direction by moving the heatbed.
When shooting a timelapse video, you need to keep the heatbed level position fixed, and only change its vertical position. Hover, the A1 mini machine will constantly move the heatbed when printing. So to successfully shoot a timelapse video, the A1 mini will move the heatbed to a fixed position (let the nozzle be at the left center position relative to the heatbed) before each picture, and then move it back to the object to continue printing after taking the picture.
But this will cause pauses in the printing process, which will affect the printing effect. There is no prime tower to absorb defects for traditional mode timelapse. So our strategy is to print the defects into the infill as much as possible to ensure the surface quality, but if the model does not have a filling area in this layer, the defects are inevitable. In this case, it is not recommended to enable traditional timelapse.
The picture below is a comparison of the quality of model without infill between enable traditional timelapse and disable traditional timelapse.
¶ 4. Where to get timelapse video files
After printing, the generated timelapse video will be stored on the SD card of the printer.