Watch Six Months of Sails Pavilion Renovation in Five Minutes

The renovation of our 90,000 square-foot Sails Pavilion is finally complete. After six-months of active construction in the exhibit space, it has been re-opened with some illuminating additions.

Thanks to a collaborative effort between San Diego Convention Center staff, its Board of Directors as well as City and State officials, funding in the form of a historic $25.5 million loan was acquired for this project as well as seven other capital improvement projects to enhance the venue. The total cost of the roof replacement, new water cannons for the fire-suppression system and concrete flooring totaled $16.7 million. New LED lighting, which was funded by the Convention Center, was the final touch to the new and improved space.

We're proud to share that the entire roof-replacement project has been documented with a time-lapse video. Here's how it was created:

• We used two cameras. One is a GoPro HERO5, which was capturing one picture per minute. The GoPro used a time-lapse video function that stitched those picture together in a 4K video format automatically.
• The second camera was TrueLook camera, which was capturing one picture every two minutes, and was also programmed to stop in frequent periods of non-activity (i.e. nothing was changing after midnight in the Pavilion.) The awesome feature of the TrueLook camera is that we could access those images live, immediately after they were captured. The GoPro required some breaks in recording for our staff to take the camera down, offload the photos and replace the microSD card.

At the end of the project, the TrueLook camera had captured over 85,000 images. These were manually stitched together at 30 frames per second to create the time-lapse video. And remember, the GoPro took at least the double that amount of images.

The final count for the amount of footage was about 47 minutes of video from the TrueLook, and over 97 minutes of video from the GoPro.

Both of these files had to be scrubbed through to cut periods of non-activity. For the GoPro that meant every night and weekend had to be removed, and the TrueLook needed most evenings and weekends. The final cuts of high-activity time-lapse were about 24 minutes on the GoPro and 20 minutes on the TrueLook.

The last step was to combine both of these angles and strategically cut out footage until we had 5 minutes of sizzle, then sync it to music.

Here's the final product, we hope you enjoy this striking look back at this landmark project.