I recorded about 25 minutes of footage with a HD camcorder, whilst playing back in Windows Media Player I used Fraps to record a snapshot every 5 seconds this gave me about 305 images.
I then used the images in Windows Movie Maker and set it to swap images every 0.30 seconds (have a play around, the lower the seconds the more smoother the results and vice versa.

I made this to show that you don't need expensive equipment to create timelapse footage.
Hope this inspires some fellow amateur photographers out there