Check out this sunset timelapse that Mike shot using CHDK. Paragliders streak across the sky like lasers!
(click play to start) (link to other sizes)
Filed under: bay area, video |
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Tagged: CHDK , mike , paragliders , sunset , timelapse
I thought I would share a couple of helpful GPL command lines that really get the job done if you want to animate a sequence of images.
First (via Mike) is news of the jhead project. Unbelievably the ImageCapture.app application that ships with Mac OS X cannot handle more than several thousand images. ImageCapture.app will copy all of the image files, but the number sequence wraps around and it overwrites thousands of the earlier images in the sequence!! jhead fixes all that by renaming all of the image files based on the EXIF timestamp in the JPG file. brilliant! Here is the commandline he recommends:
Now you have a nifty sequence of hopefully hi-res images. One of the cool things about timelapse is you can shoot 5 megapixel images and then scale them down to NTSC (720×480) or HD (1920×1024) resolution. In fact if some crazy 5 megapixel video format comes out 10 years from now, you will be able to support that as well! (As an aside, the Digital Cinema releases that are dribbling out to theaters these days are at 2,000 pixels wide. Eventually that will go up to 4,000 pixels wide, but there are not currently projectors that can support that resolution!)
So anyway, megapixels. How do you scale the images without fudging it up? A little known fact is that most video that looks crappy because of “the video compression” actually looks crappy because of the way the video was scaled down to its postage stamp resolution. So here is what you do: Use the fantastic ImageMagick “convert” command to scale your images down at even higher quality than photoshop! for free! and without using a dumb GUI scripting language. You can read about image scaling in laborious detail or you can just use this command line:
I put the following bash script into a makefile to process my timelapse library:
And finally I would like to share the “ghetto HD” format that VJ Science came up with for doing 16:9 format on an XGA projector. This command includes cropping to get my 1600×1200 images into 16:9 aspect ratio … if you have a different source resolution, I’m going to leave it to you multiply your image width by 9 and divide by 16 to figure out the how many pixels to crop on top and bottom. The idea is to crop first and then scale down. Although I guess in terms of quality it doesn’t matter the order.
Now you’ve got a nifty sequence of beautifully scaled images. Time to make video! Which of the 7 bajillion video codecs are you going to use? My recommendation is to use ffmpeg to make an mpeg-2 “master” that you can distribute by uploading to youtube, archive.org, and so on. ffmpeg understands image sequences! So here is a quick way to get your mpeg-2 video (no audio). This command assumes your images are named like “IMG_0001.JPG” and so on … I know that doesn’t jive with the jhead naming I’ve outlined above, but you are a big unix haxor and can figure that out.
For my purpose I am building up a video library for doing VJ/video mixing stuff. In this use case video quality and decode speed is much more important than bitrate. Since decoding mpeg-2 “I” frames is about 3x faster than decoding “P” or “B” (difference) frames I use this command to get a high quality I-frame only mpeg-2 stream:
You can get higher quality by dropping qscale down even lower, but I think if you do qscale=1 your video basically won’t be compressed at all :-) rajbot?
So there you have it! The basics of an Open Source timelapse production pipeline. I use these tools on Mac OS X. Of course they are available on GNU/Linux. And you can also get them working under windows using Cygwin … We need more timelapse!
Link to jhead project
Link to ImageMagick project
Link to FFmpeg project
Filed under: photos, video |
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Tagged: commandline , ffmpeg , ImageMagick , jhead , timelapse
Check out this gorgeous timelapse that Mike made:
(click play to start) (link to other sizes)
Filed under: tiki lifestyle, video |
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Tagged: CHDK , mike , sunset , timelapse
Check out this gorgeous timelapse Mike shot from the Haleakala summit in Maui using CHDK.
(click play to start) (link to other sizes)
Filed under: video |
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Tagged: CHDK , mike , sunset , timelapse
Here’s a link to the finished drawing. (and where you can get one too.)
Filed under: doodles, tiki lifestyle, zara |
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Tagged: timelapse
But it’s still fun. At 2.1fps, I think pedestrians will look cool, I’m going to try to capture people getting on and off of BART or something.
I’m shooting JPEG sequences at 1600×1200 with the hope of being able to repurpose the content as HD. But for now the target is nice SD sequences, maybe 16×9 format if I can manage it. I got some 2GB SD Cards, these will hold about 3200 1600×1200 JPEG images, so I can record a timelapse of up to 1/2 hour. I want to play the content back at 60fps, so that will work out to a playback time of about 1 minute. It’s not much to write home about in the timelapse world, but then again I haven’t even dragged my ass outside to shoot a 1/2 hour sequence yet, which is really the whole point.
Link to My First Timelapse using The Best Codec Ever
Link to My First Timelapse using Crappy Flash Video
Mike has made another fantastic timelapse! Mike sez:
I took some pictures of Thursday night’s sunset from a crumbling clifftop in Daly City.
Notes:
Yes, the speed changes partway through - I switched from capturing to the laptop (slow) to capturing to the camera card (faster).
Theres a line in the water, growing from the right. The ebb tide from the Bay?
The animation runs from 7:40 to 9:05 (pm).
1700 frames, 30fps.
The clouds jump right out of the screen and I love the way the fog rolls in at the end.
Link to stunning 1280×720 version (30MB).
Link to various smaller versions.
Mike made this great timelapse of the sunrise in the Alabama Hills:
Larry made a bunch of pretty timelapses of San Francisco. I like the Kite Hill sunset one..
Filed under: video |
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Tagged: mike , timelapse
Mike made this