spatial nodes

It has been a while since I made my last timelapse movie and I figured that today was a good day to check the status of linux and timelapsing. A quick google gave me gTimelapse which should allow my to use my dSLR as a timelapse camera. This would give me two advantages over my old set-up (and one disadvantage). My old set-up was a Nikon S4 with a power adapter and a reasonably big SD card. Having a power adapter meant that I could leave it running for months, which gave me for instance:

But the minimum interval is 30 seconds, making it useless for timelapses of people moving about. Also the quality of the sensor and the lens is not as good as my dSLR. With gTimelapse I can control the interval to anything I like. gTimelapse is rather new so there’s a bit of fiddling involved, to be able to build it under ubuntu 9.10 you need these packages:

sudo apt-get install build-essential libgphoto2-2-dev libwxbase2.8-dev libwxgtk2.8-dev

From then on it is pretty straight forward, connect your camera (make sure it is in PTP mode) also ubuntu nowadays mounts it automagically, gTimelapse doesn’t like that. So unmount the camera using the filemanager and start gTimelapse. Depending on your camera you get all kinds of settings you can fiddle with. (side note I discovered that if you first start gTimelapse and than attach the camera none of the settings appear, but the application still works). Once you’re happy you can press start and sit back.

Creating a movie is still a lot more complicated I’m afraid. I still haven’t found a decent movie editor for linux. Kino is nice but only supports DV camera’s as far as I can tell, dragging something non-DV gives an eternal Kino Import progress bar kdenlive looks promising, but it kept freezing so I gave up on it for the moment. To just get a short movie I threw mencoder at them:

mencoder -nosound -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:mbd=2:mv0:trell:v4mv:cbp:last_pred=3:predia=2:dia=2:vmax_b_frames=2:vb_strategy=1:precmp=2:cmp=2:subcmp=2:preme=2:qns=2 -o test5.avi -mf type=jpeg:fps=5 mf://@files.txt

Where files.txt was a list of the filenames of all the images I wanted to include. This resulted in this movie:

This means it possible to create timelapse movies with linux, but postprocessing is still difficult. The next timelapse project I’ll probably shoot with linux and edit on my mac

This post is tagged Open Source, personal, timelapse