The most advantageous in the case of time-lapse videos is the frame rate of acquisition. Since we only have to acquire frames at a very low rate, we can dedicate the rest of the video acquisition time for processing the acquired frames. For instance, when we want to acquire one frame every minute like in our previous example, the frame rate is 1/1500 of the actual PAL frame rate (in a minute we acquire 1 frame instead of 25*60 in the case of a regular PAL video).

Technically, this means that we may dedicate the remaining 1499/1500 of each minute for processing our acquired frame. This usually is enough for real-time application of all kinds of processing tasks, for example, color masking, image smoothing, and so on. Ultimately, this means that the acquired video sequence can be artistically processed to achieve very interesting visual results. To demonstrate one of these results, we will now try to blend a time-lapse acquisition process with the color isolation techniques we presented in Chapter 4, Working with Color Images.