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Creating a timelapse movie with ubuntu

wordpress — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 21:13:43 +0000

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:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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

New camera

stvn — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 09:56:11 +0000

My shiny new Nikon D60 with extra lens has arrived, woohoo!! Since I’m still at work I can’t play with it yet, but here is my first shot with and of the camera.

More to follow

… paint it black

stvn — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 16:34:44 +0000

I finally finished painting all the doors and jambs. I managed to squeeze in one black door, although it was not originally red. My bathroom door is now painted with chalkboard-paint and since it is visible from both the living room and the kitchen it serves very well as a todo list. (and no I haven’t found Maartens book yet )

Finished painting

I see a red door …

stvn — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 08:22:42 +0000

… and want to paint it white. Actually the red door is they only door that I did not paint white. Everything is now in white primer and I’ve to figure out what color to paint the doors and the jambs of the front door. Suggestions are welcome.

Server up ‘n running

stvn — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 21:06:18 +0000

As no-one should have noticed, this blog is running on the new server now. Building the server turned out to be very easy, just pop in the CPU and the RAM at the correct places, connect some cables and put everything in the case. Installing ubuntu turned out to be much harder. For a starter I needed to have a CD-rom drive. Just before my holiday, I had stored a lot of stuff in my basement(ish). Somewhere there was supposed to be a working CD-rom drive. After discovering 2 scsi drives and 1 non-working IDE drive I discovered my trusty old Philips drive which has installed me many versions of linux so far. Having a working cd drive I switched on the computer once again only to discover that my shiny new motherboard (asus M3n78-emh) doesn’t work on ubuntu 8.04 by default. Luckily I used the old trick of installing OS’s: have a working internet enabled computer alongside! It turned out to be some settings in both BIOS and linux (pci=nomsi) and once you know it, it’s a breeze to install it. So the second computer was build and installed in less then a quarter of the time .

Copying data from the 4 old IDE disks to the 2 new SATA ones

New dual server

stvn — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 11:45:23 +0000

The hardware for my new server setup has arrived. To make sure I’ve got a proper off-site backup I’ve arranged with my sister and her boyfriend to buy two identical machines, put one here and one there and mirror the content using rsync. So everything is in dual-form: 2 antec 4480b cases, 2 dual core AMD X2 4450e, 2 2GB DDR2 (actually 4 1GB but it breaks the dual flow), 2 times 2 750GB samsung spinpoints and 2 ASUS motherboards. I hope this setup will be more quiet than my current server and at least as energy efficient.

seeing everything twice

Now I’ve to go to the store to get a CD so I can burn a AMD64 Ubuntu 8.04 CD and start installing.