We want to create an indoor time-lapse movie that will span a period of several months to document the creation of our company's product. Producing a high quality video is important, and we're willing to spend up to a few thousand dollars for good equipment if needed for the best quality image. We would probably want it to take maybe one frame a minute which would give us about 30 minutes of video/month I believe.

It needs to be a system that will run on it's own with little/no maintenance. So preferably some kind of setup that doesn't require changing batteries or putting in new memory cards. So ideally it would probably be a high quality camera hooked up to a computer I would think?

By the way, we're located in the San Francisco area if anyone knows of good local sources of products or knowledgeable people that you would recommend.

Sounds like a very interesting project. However, I do have reservations about your choice of interval time. If the time lapse shoot is going to go on for several months, I think one minute intervals is way too short. The finished film is going to end up ridiculously long. Plus, the changes you see in the footage will be too slow - too gradual. Most time lapse clips are around 8 - 15 seconds with some going to a minute or two or longer. I think those sort of durations are good for maintaining viewer interest but it also depends on the type of subject matter. If you did want the finished film to last for a lengthy duration, I would recommend using multiple cameras shooting from different angles with a mix of long shots, mid shots and close ups. This would make the end product much more interesting to look at. Sure, time lapse can be really cool and fun to watch but if it goes on for a really long time with the same fixed viewpoint, the viewer's interest may wane.

That's true. The idea was to capture more frames than we could possibly need just so we would have them in case we wanted to do an extra movie of a particular day or something of that sort. But for the actual movie of several months of work, yeah we would make that a much shorter movie and not use all those frames.

I use an Olympus OMD EM-5 for biolapse. Using the grip and AC adapter, it can run extended periods. While M43 uses a smaller sensor than Crop or Full Frame cameras, the image quality is extremely good and should be more than enough for your purposes.

check out my site http://www.biolapse.com and check out the gallery and blog, (there are more samples in the blog than library) all the timelapse sequences in there were done indoors with an Olympus OMD Em-5. I ran into an issue with flicker, but that was due to the lighting not the camera and i have recently ironed that out.

You can use an eye-fi card to wirelessly dump images to a remote PC as it progresses so you can see the results without disturbing the camera.

the longest i have shot without interruption is about a week. But the camera had no problems with this.

The Olympus OMD EM-5 can be found at a discounted price as it has been discontinued with the newer OMD EM-1, but there is no benefit of the new model vs the older one for this type of work. They use the same sensor. You WILL need to find an intervalometer.