Timelapse – James Batchelor

Automated Timelapse: 2019 Update

I like this time of year, a chance to reflect on the last 12 months and take stock of accomplishments and realise the achievements. And something I like to gauge a success on is the longevity of a solution, and a time-lapse comparison 6 months apart is seemingly my go to example.

To elaborate on this achievement, earlier this year was the setup of a homebrew CCTV solution using an array of Raspberry Pi’s with cameras, and a VM Cent OS server acting as a PVR host. A surplus Pi W Zero was pointed at the hills and used as a time-lapse experiment.

The real achievement is that since its conception in early June, it has been stable enough to run in the background, capturing footage for such an occasion.

So here I present my latest time-lapse, a split screen video on the difference between a June day and a December day:

Automated Timelapse: Update

Its been a year since my time-lapse post, and since my server has been working away without external input capturing and archiving the view from from my window the entire time.

Something I wanted to capture is a time-lapse of of summer and winter from the same perspective, in order to see the difference between the two polar seasons in terms of sunlight.

Now with a year’s worth of capture and as a tribute to the reliability of the code, I thought to quickly splice together a June and December time lapse video:

Its interesting to see how the webcam when left at the default settings interprets light values over a sustained period of time. As even in the summer it will get as dark as the winter night at some point, I thought of this as a natural reset point for the cam’s light values.

Choosing a similar weather conditions at both ends of the daylight spectrum (23/06 and 19/12) the camera seemingly registers a different light strength.

Anyways it is still an interesting watch regardless of the date its being viewed at, hope you enjoy, and wishing you a happy new year!

Automated Time-lapse Solution

A while ago I worked on a simple CCTV system for work, which involved using software to capture images every second then batch convert them to video every five minutes. It was crude but did the job.

I also dabbled in the past with time lapse videos, however this was a more manual process with images capturing to a folder, then personally loading them into Windows Movie Maker to create the video. With the tedium of creating the videos, the software I used for capturing (YAWCam) would hang after a few weeks constant running, not to mention without upkeep, the hundreds of thousands of image files populating the hard drive.

As a project it was time to combine the learnings from these and create an automated time lapse video creator, a program that would capture images, then create a 5-minute video that contains the days’ footage, and finish by deleting the temporary images to leave just the days video.

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