Wow, thanks for your kind comments! I didn't want to sound arrogant with the "something I whipped together" -kind of description. I'm am quite happy with what came out, but I'm kicking myself a bit with what could have been.
I'm glad to share info (I'll try to be specific, since there's interest) and answer any questions.
Idea
The idea came basically when I realized, having watched some timelapse videos, that often very slow movement is sped up, and I wanted to try it with some fast action to start with. The "unlimited burst" mode shoots a bit more than one frame per second (at least with my card and settings). I wanted to speed the video up directly, but 24x time acceleration was just ridiculous and uncomprehensible. So I changed the approach a bit seeing the first results at home. I've tried some timelapse stuff with videos and the intervalometer mode on my Canon S2 compact with shots one minute apart (why don't all cameras have this in the software?). Many of the timelapse videos I've seen also have movement made with motorized units rotating or moving on rails (zoom is very rarely controlled like this) etc., dollys. I was thinking of mimicing this with moving a cropping rectangle over the image, but didn't know it would work that well on a "moving" image.
Shooting
The shooting was very much like "Honey, I got to try shooting this location. It'll take a few minutes, go warm your hands in the cafeteria in the meantime." So no second takes or very long sequences.
I set the camera to 6M resolution and low-quality jpeg for the images. I varied aspect ratio depending what I wanted in the image, knowing I'd have plenty of pixel space for cropping. In 16:9 mode it meant I had 3328x1872 source resolution to start with. For the same reason I preferred shooting quite wide angle for most of the time. I used manual exposure to make sure the the images don't vary unexpectedly in brightness, and used the on-screen meter to underexpose them up to one stop (due to likely highlight clipping). I did shoot some highspeed targets with longer exposures, but in the end I had to drop them, since they usually just didn't work being difficult to make up anything. The used shots are 1/30 to 1/8s in exposure time. I tried to keep ISO down (200 or under) to avoid noise. I also shot some videos I wanted to mix in, but the image quality just wasn't on par. I also wanted to do my "normal" shooting, and I shot a 100 or so shots of stuff in the park and my girlfriend. I also used flash quite a lot, so I was just sure the battery wouldn't last for the sequences. That's one reason I didn't want to stress too much about the shots, I thought I wouldn't have enough of them for anything. In the end I was just amazed at the battery performance. It's even now showing 2 bars when powered on, but will drop to one after a couple of shots. I was really impressed anyhow.
Like I said, I had no tripod and no shutter remote control. This means I laid the camera on some handrail, thrash bin, held it against a tree, whatever was there and squeezed the shutter until I had enough frames. Often I didn't have enough, I didn't really know how many I need, but I went for around 50 to 100 at least for any sequence. Once I accidentally let go, then realized it and started again, resulting in a completely unbearable shake in the middle. A few times I tried to follow a subject, but that just resulted in too jerky movement and too much motion blur, and is really difficult to try to peek at the screen in an already awkward position. And it was cold that night, close to zero and my hands were absolutely freezing at times. (Even more credit to the battery performance) We had three hours in the park, so that's not a very long timeframe.
That's crazy! If you do many sessions like that, your question about the life span is totally valid. Something I'd never pay attention to, at least with a new camera.
