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Time lapse video system

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Hello everyone!

 

One of our customers requested a time lapse camera system so that their corporate office can look at ongoing expansion. So here I am looking for some input from you guys. I've done some research and looks like a lot of TL videos used Mobotix cameras so I'm going to stick with that.

 

From what I understand there's really no automated way to do it so I will need to:

1) Get images from camera at certain interval (1min-3min)

2) Import images to video editing software

3) Export a video in some format (AVI or MPEG)

4) Present video to a customer (upload to Tube, or shared folder)

 

So if anyone with experience on this matter would share some ideas I'd really appreciate it!

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My Vigil DVR allows me to set pretty much any framerate up to one frame every four hours (well, in multiples - 1, 2, 4, 8, 15, 30, 60 minutes, 2 or 4 hours, in addition to going up to 30fps), then export the results as a native MJPEG stream, or as an AVI.

 

I have one IQEye IP camera on it, I'm recording one channel at 5fps with standard motion detection... another channel is recording the same camera at one frame every hour, specifically to create a time-lapse output.

 

I just exported the past week here, if you want to see it in action: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4030692/Vigil%20Exports/Time%20Lapse%20Demo%20-%20one%20week.avi

 

(Note, it's a 1.3MP source, but I had it export at D1 and at a low bitrate so it would create a smaller file to download... this was all done within Vigil, no additional software required).

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We have done this a couple of times. We used a seperate time lapse program to capture frames and them stored them on a harddrive. The advantage is that you can set the frame rate very low I think we were at one frame per minute or less. You then use an animator program to make your movie. (Movie Salsa or Antechinus AudioVideo Processor)or several others Video was dumped to a onsite pc and to our office over the intenet. Pics are jpegs and I had to deal with 10,000 ot them.

 

To make a decent movie you have to set things up to only record when they are working. Cut out most or all of the night and strip out the rain days . I spent a couple of days editing it down to a 3 or 4 min movie.

 

Make sure your customer knows that this is not security one of our customers was upset when something happened on the weekend and we are not recording when no work is being done.

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Soundy: thanks a lot for the clip. Unfortunately, it is produced by (Vigil) VMS. We're going to use another VMS for this site eventually...

 

Jeromephone: seems like I'm going correct route in this case... ugh... I'm not really into video editing but will have to do it this time. We agreed on a weekly and monthly videos so it shouldn't be too bad (vs. daily)

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Just record the video as normal, export it and use your choice of software to edit the frame rate.

 

Here's a tutorial explaining how to do it with iMovie http://creativetechs.com/iq/create_timelapse_videos_with_imovie_hd_6.html.

 

It's probably best if you set the camera to only record during times that you want to include in the movie so that all you have to do is edit the frame rate and deliver the final file to your customer.

 

Good luck with your project.

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