time-lapse-artifacts

485 time-lapse recordings of one artist's traditional drawing practice across nearly two years (September 2024–August 10, 2026), with standardized acquisition since July 13, 2025. Across approximately 1.90 TB of video, the archive follows the same artist working in physical media—including pencil, ballpoint pen, fountain pen, graphite, and ink—on fixed-format paper and illustration board. The release combines 357 canonical Standard videos and 128 earlier Pre-Standard recordings. Every published video has a persistent record ID, content hash, byte size, and encoded-stream metadata; historical session and provenance fields remain less complete in the Pre-Standard tier.

In this dataset, provenance refers to the documented relationship between a physical drawing and its time-lapse record, rather than to histories of ownership or sale.

An earlier 2012–2016 archive of more than 8 TB also exists, consisting primarily of uploaded 1080p drawing videos, with some livestream-derived material. It is not yet published in this dataset and is excluded from the current 485-record, 1.90-TB release totals. This is an active construction release.

Snapshot and Coverage

These counts describe the current main branch. The immutable v0.3.0 tag contains 467 rows: 338 Standard and 129 Pre-Standard. A later curator-verified provenance correction promoted one distinct Standard recording from the noncanonical unresolved subtree. A subsequent creator-verified ingestion added 17 unique Standard media objects. A subsequent creator-verified tier review promoted the clean July 13 recording without changing its payload or stable identity, bringing current main to 357 Standard and 128 Pre-Standard records. Two records from the 17-object ingestion and the promoted July 13 record are explicitly documented as shortened derivatives rather than full-duration masters.

Collection tier	Published MP4s	Indexed rows	Date coverage	Metadata state
standard	357 direct files	357	2025-07-13–2026-08-10	Complete core technical metadata for every direct Standard file
pre_standard	128	128	2024-09-17–2025-07-09, plus 9 unknown dates	Complete core technical metadata; historical descriptive and provenance gaps remain
Earlier archive (unpublished)	0 public videos	0	Historical scope 2012–2016	More than 8 TB held outside this release; ingestion pending

Current published index: main contains 485 rows: 357 Standard and 128 Pre-Standard. The preceding v0.1 state at revision 339e6149de130cbe2d001f7a0e5247872bc788ec exposed 465 rows: 335 Standard and 130 Pre-Standard. v0.2 added three previously unindexed Standard files and removed one Pre-Standard row whose media did not meet the ownership and provenance threshold. v0.3 added stable Pre-Standard identities and technical metadata. The post-v0.3 provenance correction promotes one previously unresolved, distinct Standard recording and corrects a separate record's physical finish date and time. The later 17-record Standard ingestion applies technical and provenance criteria without filtering records by aesthetic completion or perceived artistic quality. The later July 13 promotion applies the same rule to a clean shortened record and moves the documented Standard boundary coherently rather than creating a one-file exception.

The Hub configurations use the split name archive. No official train/validation/test partition has been defined.

Viewer and Metadata Discovery

The release exposes two explicit configurations so metadata-complete canonical records are not silently mixed with historically less complete records:

• canonical/archive is the default and loads root metadata.csv with the 357 direct files in Standard_Time_Lapses/
• pre_standard/archive loads Pre_Standard_Time_Lapses/metadata.csv with the 128 direct files in that folder

Each configuration has the same declared 29-column schema. Stored dimensions and byte sizes are nullable integers, has_audio is a nullable boolean, and encoded frame rate remains a float because historical encodings include fractional reported rates. Undocumented values load as null rather than as zero or false. Both indexes declare tier membership directly: the root index sets collection_tier = standard and is_canonical = true; the Pre-Standard CSV sets collection_tier = pre_standard and is_canonical = false.

Published-index completeness is defined by the 357 rows in canonical/archive plus the 128 rows in pre_standard/archive and their generated Parquet exports. Hugging Face's separate column Statistics job is an auxiliary, asynchronous surface; its availability is not used to claim or reject row-level completeness.

The configuration lists the two active metadata.csv files and only direct MP4 paths in Standard_Time_Lapses/ and Pre_Standard_Time_Lapses/. It does not use a recursive canonical glob, so the nested Standard_Time_Lapses/Provenance/ subtree is excluded.

Overview

time-lapse-artifacts documents analog drawing processes across different recording periods and acquisition conditions. Raw video is the primary record. Metadata identifies, organizes, compares, and documents recordings without imposing aesthetic scores or stylistic labels.

The collection is a single-creator longitudinal archive. This makes it useful for studying within-practice change, but it does not represent artists, materials, studios, or drawing practices broadly.

Repository Structure

Standard_Time_Lapses/

The directory contains 357 direct MP4 files. metadata.csv is their complete machine-readable canonical index: every direct file has one validated row with core technical metadata. Direct placement alone is not sufficient for future additions; metadata and release validation are required.

Each canonical metadata row now includes:

• a persistent record_id
• collection_tier = standard
• is_canonical = true
• acquisition_protocol_version = standard-2025-07-13
• descriptive session fields
• encoded video properties
• repository content hash and size
• provenance fields where documented

Files use a structured filename convention described in SCHEMA.md. A filename is descriptive, but it is not the stable identity of a record; external references should use record_id.

Standard_Time_Lapses/Provenance/

This subtree contains supporting historical records and retained exceptions. It is not part of the canonical record set.

2026-07-31/ preserves the completed provenance release, including mappings between historical Series_9x12 filenames and canonical records. The former full duplicate video snapshot is not retained. Relationships are preserved through mappings, hashes, metadata, and repository history.

Unresolved_Series_9x12/ contains distinct historical recordings that do not yet have enough documentation for promotion into the canonical collection.

Pre_Standard_Time_Lapses/

These 128 recordings predate the standard acquisition protocol. They are published for archival continuity but are not interchangeable with canonical standard records. Each now has a stable record_id, exact Hub content hash and size, playback duration, stored dimensions and orientation, frame rate, codec, pixel format, container, and audio-stream presence. Historical dates, times, materials, and provenance remain incomplete where evidence is unavailable. Missing values must not be interpreted as zero, false, or evidence that a property was absent.

The folder-local metadata.csv is the active index for these 128 videos and is loaded by the pre_standard/archive configuration. It follows the same declared 29-field schema as the canonical index while leaving undocumented historical fields empty.

Material that does not meet the archive's ownership and provenance threshold is excluded from both the published media and the active metadata index.

Earlier_Archive_2012_2016/

More than 8 TB of earlier material is held outside this dataset. It consists primarily of uploaded 1080p drawing videos, with some livestream-derived material. At the audited snapshot it contains no public video data. References to 2012–2016 therefore describe archive scope, not current downloadable coverage.

Metadata and Provenance

The metadata distinguishes documented facts, established historical relationships, and unresolved information. Evidence may include:

• exact file/blob identity
• original filenames and repository paths
• file sizes and hashes
• duration comparison
• visual continuity across recordings
• documented physical references
• repository commit history

Uncertain relationships are not promoted to verified relationships solely because dates or filenames look similar.

The active CSV files and live Viewer use semicolons for multiple tool and medium values, for example Pencil;FountainPen and Graphite;Ink. A pipe (|) is not a valid separator in v0.2. The two fields are independent observed-value lists; equal list lengths and positional pairing are not guaranteed. See SCHEMA.md.

encoded_frame_rate is encoded playback rate. It is not the original temporal sampling rate of the drawing process.

Acquisition and Stored-Video Orientation

The acquisition protocol effective July 15, 2025 is documented in Archive_Specifications.md.

The protocol's capture orientation and a file's stored pixel orientation are different concepts. The orientation, width_px, and height_px metadata describe the published encoded file. Historical canonicalization may include a rotation, crop, or transcode; those transformations are documented only where evidence currently exists and must not be inferred from dimensions alone.

The July 15, 2025 protocol boundary is explicitly encoded in canonical metadata. It supports era-aware comparison of repeated physical-media practice, but it is an acquisition change, not a skill-change label. Differences across that boundary may reflect capture conditions as well as practice development.

Annotation State

Session-level descriptive and provenance metadata are curated by the creator from the physical practice, filenames, file properties, and retained historical evidence. This is the scope of annotations_creators: expert-generated; it does not mean that frame-level task labels exist. Likewise, language: en describes the filename vocabulary, metadata, and documentation, not incidental audio.

The video-classification task facet refers to possible session-level targets such as documented tool, medium, and support. The release does not define label encodings, an official benchmark, or train/validation/test partitions.

The videos themselves are primarily raw and unannotated. The release does not provide:

• frame-level bounding boxes or segmentation masks
• hand, pen-tip, pose, or stroke labels
• aesthetic or quality scores
• imposed stylistic classifications
• calibrated physical trajectories
• original capture timestamps for individual time-lapse frames

Researchers may derive annotations, but derived labels should identify the source record_id and pinned repository revision.

Intended and Unsupported Uses

Reasonable uses in the current release

• archival and drawing-process research
• qualitative within-creator analysis of practice and skill development across repeated physical-media sessions
• self-supervised video representation experiments
• frame-change, scene, and workspace analysis
• development of annotation and tracking methods

Uses requiring additional validation or calibration

• hand or pen-tip tracking
• optical-flow comparison across acquisition eras
• temporal behavior analysis
• real-world trajectory, velocity, acceleration, or motor-control measurement

The release does not currently provide capture intervals, acceleration factors, source-frame timestamps, camera calibration, or pixel-to-physical coordinate mapping. Encoded time-lapse playback must not be treated as real drawing time.

Not validated

• population-level claims about artists or drawing behavior
• clinical, biometric, authorship, or identity inference
• a leakage-safe training or evaluation benchmark
• commercial use outside the CC BY-NC 4.0 terms

Limitations and Sources of Bias

• The archive documents one creator and one evolving practice.
• Current public video coverage begins in 2024, not 2012.
• The standard and pre-standard tiers have substantially different historical descriptive/provenance completeness and acquisition conditions.
• The workspace can contain hands, tools, phones, tablets, reference material, and other objects that may create visual shortcuts or occlusion.
• Stored resolution and frame rate do not establish physical or temporal calibration.
• Large files make exhaustive inspection and replication expensive.
• No official leakage-safe split exists.

Rights, Privacy, and Audio

The creator confirms ownership of the published video files and depicted creator-owned drawings. Material that cannot pass the ownership and provenance review is not part of the active public index and is not distributed by this release. This statement does not independently grant rights in incidental third-party material that may appear on screens, in references, or in captured audio.

Nearly all published masters retain an audio stream. has_audio records stream presence only; it does not establish that the stream contains meaningful signal. Users are responsible for reviewing audio, visible screens, references, reflections, tattoos, and other potentially identifying or third-party content before redistribution or model release. A future proxy release should remove audio by default while preserving the archival masters.

Access and Reproducibility

The active 485-video release contains 1,901,279,778,073 bytes of video (approximately 1.90 TB, or 1.73 TiB). Canonical files are often several gigabytes each, so users should select records through metadata.csv before downloading video.

Bandwidth-safe Quick Start

Install Hugging Face Datasets, stream the archive, and disable decoding while selecting records:

from datasets import Video, load_dataset

dataset = load_dataset(
    "maxwellinked/time-lapse-artifacts",
    "canonical",
    split="archive",
    streaming=True,
)
metadata = dataset.cast_column("video", Video(decode=False))
first = next(iter(metadata))
print(first["video"]["path"], first["tool"], first["medium"])

This exposes the complete metadata schema without transferring video bytes. Default decoded row access additionally requires torchcodec and a compatible video-decoding stack. Use streaming=True unless a full archive download is intentional.

Use "pre_standard" as the configuration name to stream the earlier tier.

For reproducible work:

1. Pin a repository commit or release tag.
2. Record the selected record_id values.
3. Preserve the published hub_xet_hash values.
4. State whether audio was retained.
5. Document all rotation, crop, sampling, decoding, and proxy-generation steps.

Run the included validator before publishing a metadata change:

python tools/validate_metadata.py metadata.csv \
  --pre-standard-metadata Pre_Standard_Time_Lapses/metadata.csv

tools/enrich_prestandard.py reproduces the Pre-Standard technical fields from a pinned Hub inventory and MP4 container headers. It uses HTTP range requests through FFmpeg; it does not intentionally download complete videos. tools/capture_hub_inventory.py records the corresponding Xet file IDs from resolve headers without following redirects or transferring video payloads.

The v0.2 index can be regenerated from the pinned 335-row source index plus the three audited additions:

python tools/repair_metadata.py source_metadata.csv metadata.csv \
  --additions tools/metadata_additions_v0.2.csv

Versioning

The repository is under active construction. Record identity is carried by record_id; a filename may be corrected without creating a new conceptual record. Content replacement must retain provenance and should receive a new content hash.

See CHANGELOG.md for release-level changes.

Documentation

• metadata.csv — canonical machine-readable index
• Pre_Standard_Time_Lapses/metadata.csv — active pre-standard public index
• SCHEMA.md — filename and metadata contracts
• Archive_Specifications.md — acquisition specifications and known gaps
• VALIDATION.md — validation scope and current results
• tools/capture_hub_inventory.py — pinned Hub/Xet identity inventory
• tools/enrich_prestandard.py — pinned Pre-Standard technical enrichment
• tools/validate_metadata.py — cross-tier metadata and repository checks
• Standard_Time_Lapses/Provenance/ — historical evidence and mappings

Citation

Until a DOI-backed release is available, cite the dataset and pinned revision:

@dataset{maxwellinked_time_lapse_artifacts_2026,
  author    = {maxwellinked},
  title     = {time-lapse-artifacts},
  year      = {2026},
  publisher = {Hugging Face},
  url       = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/maxwellinked/time-lapse-artifacts},
  note      = {Active construction release; include the repository revision used}
}

License

The dataset is released under CC BY-NC 4.0. The license applies only to material for which the licensor holds the necessary rights. Users must conduct their own review of incidental third-party content and downstream use.