VoiceOfEmerika

This is a blog of my experiences working on some ideas for using a digital camera to do both time-lapsed photography and time-lapsed movies. Email me at Brad@Emerika.com

How do I do it?

In case anyone is interested…

My camera can take anywhere from 1 to 3 hours of images. I can capture 600 frames at 8 MP — or an hour at five second intervals or at 5 MP I can get about 3 hours or 1500 images. I can stretch this out further by increasing the time between images, but I have battery issues I have yet to resolve.

Once I have the images on my computer (I am running Ubuntu on all my computers) I use a program I wrote to do the processing. It is really a control program. It uses several programs that come installed on Ubuntu (or I may have installed them… hard to remember.) to do the heavy lifting. ImageMagick is what I use for cropping and image processing. There are a couple of programs I use to create the movies — ffmpeg and mencoder — these are pretty techie tools.

Photography issues:

My first (and undocumented) attempts at time lapse movies flickered terribly. It didn’t take too long to figure out that it was the camera readjusting for each photograph — the solution was to set the camera on manual. This means you have to guess at the exposure. This is especially important because night and morning are great times for movies and the exposure changes the entire time. Guesswork and experience are all you have to work with.

The step the program goes through:

–create a crop folder (in case I change the image processing, I won’t have to recrop the images)
–create a image folder
–do the image processing and resize to the final movie size
–optional blend images and or create intermediate frames
–build the movie