Creating Time-Lapse Movies

Once you've transferred photos from the SD card to your machine, you should rename them to make sure that they will be assembled in the correct order.

You'll find several renaming utilities in the official software repositories of your Linux distribution, including pyRenamer, GPRename, and KRename. The latter is a perfect choice if you happen to use KDE as your preferred graphical desktop environment. To replace default file names with sequential numbers, use the renaming rule in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Renaming photos with KRename.

Once the photos have been renamed, you are ready to assemble them into a time-lapse movie. The avconv tool, which is part of the libav-tools package, can help. To install libav-tools on Debian or Ubuntu, run the

apt-get install libav-tools

command as root. Although the avconv tool supports a wide range of parameters, you can start with a simple command, as follows:

avconv -y -r 30 -i %3d.jpg -vcodec libx264 timelapse.mp4;

This command uses the H.264 video codec to create a movie in the MP4 format with a 30fps frame rate.

Instead of using the KRenamer and avconv combination, you can opt for an alternative method: Run the

ls -1tr > files.txt

command in the directory containing photos to generate a list of files sorted by modification date in reverse order. Next, install the mencoder tool (on Debian and Ubuntu, run the following as root):

apt-get install mencoder

and use the following command:

mencoder -nosound -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4 \
  -o timelapse.avi -mf type=jpeg:fps=30 mf://@files.txt

This command generates a time-lapse movie without sound, but you can use the -audiofile parameter to add a music track to the movie:

mencoder -audiofile "/path/to/foo.mp3" -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4 \
  -o timelapse.avi -mf type=jpeg:fps=30 mf://@files.txt

Wait until the tool finishes generating the movie, open the resulting .mp4 file, and behold the created time-lapse video in all its beauty.