DIY time-lapse photography
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.
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.
Infos
- Wikipedia article on time-lapse photography: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-lapse_photography
- Ordning egg timer: http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/30066725/
- Sugru: http://sugru.com
- CHDK wiki: http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/CHDK
- STICK utility: http://zenoshrdlu.com/stick/stick.html
- CHDK-SVN autobuild: http://mighty-hoernsche.de/
- Time-lapse photography uBasic script: http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/UBASIC/Scripts:Time_Lapse_Photography
- Scripting Layer for Android: http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting
- Make your own ACK-DC30: http://techwatch.keeward.com/geeks-and-nerds/make-your-own-ack-dc30-adapter-kit-for-canon-camera-with-a-nb-5l-battery/
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