Wired timelapse / interval remote for Sony A7 & A7r

29/10/2014 Atte Henriksson

The Sony A7r is a very nice camera for stills photography. I even wrote an article about how well it works together with manual focus lenses.

The biggest reason I bought this camera was for the possibility to do high resolution and low light timelapses. When I bought this camera there was no way to do this. However Sony made it’s timelapse software available for this camera, which was pretty nice until I figured out a couple of flaws. The 999 frame limit was the biggest let down. 999 frames are not even a minute of footage played back in 25 fps. The second let down was the fiddly menu which could take ages to setup.

Since I sold my Panasonic GH3 and bought the Sony A7r, I’ve not shot a single timelapse. Until this week.

I saw some DIY videos on youtube about how to build an IR timelapse / interval remote which gave me an idea. The problem with the IR remotes are the lack of wires. They might work well for a average timelapse, let’s say some clouds moving over a landscape shot over a time span of an hour. But what if I wanted to shoot longer time spans, lika a plant growing in a studio? Or what if I wanted to shoot long exposure northern lights with my camera on a slider?
The best, safest and sometimes the only way has been to use a wired connection.

My idea was to just solder two existing pieces together. And it worked!

I used the Sony RM-VPR1 remote controller and a chepo Commlite timer remote controller, the S1 cabled one.

Then I went to my local technician expert guy who cut of the S1 cable and opened the RM-VPR1 and soldered the S1 cable directly to it’s circuit board. He then built a new connector for the RM-VPR1 so I could use other controllers as well.
The RM-VPR1 works still perfectly as it should with all the rec button and zooms, but now only have one more connector.