Free time lapse and maximum video length fix for Sony cameras with PlayMemories support

I have owned an old Sony α5000 for a long time, which has a built-in appli­ca­tion store from Sony. That’s right, why add all the fea­tures by default when you can sell them? Recent­ly, I need­ed to make an accel­er­at­ed (time-lapse) video, 400 rubles for this was not a pity, but it turned out that Sony not only ruined the lives of con­sol­ers, but you can no longer buy addi­tion­al soft­ware in the cam­era. They them­selves push their users to look for workarounds, so after spend­ing some time, I still found a not quite legal, but very sim­ple and free way to add a time-lapse appli­ca­tion, as well as unlock the video record­ing dura­tion lim­it as a bonus, and this works on 49 cam­era mod­els by Sony

Dur­ing the search, Google active­ly sent me to Sony, or to forums where they dis­cussed the use of a com­put­er for time-lapse pho­tog­ra­phy, and only by some mir­a­cle found instruc­tions on github for installing third-par­ty applets through the ter­mi­nal, and then a util­i­ty with a graph­i­cal inter­face, thanks to which this can be done in a cou­ple of clicks.

First you need to make sure that the USB mode is select­ed in the USB set­tings. MTP

Next down­load Sony-PMCA-RE from GithubYou can see the full list of sup­port­ed devices here

On the first tab, you can get infor­ma­tion about the con­nect­ed device

In the sec­ond tab, third-par­ty appli­ca­tions are installed, you just need to select the one you need, click install select­ed app and wait for the instal­la­tion process to fin­ish, it does not take much time

Dis­con­nect the cable, go to the appli­ca­tion list and see Time­lapsewhich we just installed. In appear­ance, the inter­face is sim­ple, but there are all the set­tings nec­es­sary for work. We select the shoot­ing inter­val and the num­ber of shots, just below it will be dis­played how much the process will take in real time and how long the final cut will be at a giv­en frame rate. Even low­er, the check­box­es allow you to fix the shut­ter speed, turn off aut­o­fo­cus, white bal­ance, with BRC3 turned on, sev­er­al shots are tak­en with dif­fer­ent expo­sures, and DOFF I don’t know what it affects, I didn’t notice a dif­fer­ence in work

After press­ing the but­ton start the screen dis­plays only infor­ma­tion about the cur­rent progress and the remain­ing bat­tery pow­er, unfor­tu­nate­ly there is no pre­view as in a pro­pri­etary appli­ca­tion, so you need to care­ful­ly con­fig­ure the desired mode before start­ing the time-lapse. On the oth­er hand, this should save bat­tery life.

With­out flash and man­u­al focus, the cam­era last­ed more than two hours, shoot­ing about 500 shots.

I also installed Open­Mem­o­ries Tweak, which allow you to get into the set­tings hid­den from the eyes of the user

The first tab dis­plays infor­ma­tion about the device

The sec­ond tab is the most use­ful, here you can turn off the video record­ing time lim­it, but it is advis­able to peri­od­i­cal­ly check the tem­per­a­ture of the cam­era dur­ing the shoot­ing process, because. it can get pret­ty hot

In the third, you can unlock all lan­guages, and not just those that the man­u­fac­tur­er has cho­sen for the region of sale, in the fourth, some set­tings are blocked, but I did not find any­thing new in the menu, maybe they are not in my mod­el. Well, the lat­ter has WiFi acti­va­tion on an ongo­ing basis, Tel­net and ADB

All the same can be done in the appli­ca­tion in the Tweaks tab

I also found out that noth­ing bad will hap­pen if the cam­era mod­el is not sup­port­ed. In my case, a warn­ing just came out that my old A58 is not suit­able, which means you can not be afraid that instead of a time­lapse or remov­ing the video record­ing restric­tion, you will get a brick, at least I have not seen such com­plaints. The stock store also does not break.

The method is work­ing, and most impor­tant­ly safe and every­one can han­dle the instal­la­tion, so use it to your health)