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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

State of the Map

stvn — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 22:59:54 +0000

My friend and colleague New Folder is organizing the State of the Map conference this year. He asked me to design a banner for the official site. The conference is, apart from the usual OSM gathering, also focusing on businesses/governments and how they can use OSM data in their line of work. So I decided to create a banner which reflects the transistion OSM has been through. It started with a single idea and a few people collecting GPS tracks. Slowly from these tracks roads could be destinguished. Different types of roads where classified and more and more data was included and suddenly you got a map which at some points was more detailed than a ‘commercial’ map.

First draft SoftM'09 banner

Loedertje has arrived

stvn — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 18:31:40 +0000

This morning I’ve collected Loedertje from the animal shelter. Apparently she was quite the lady and they warned me that she was very difficult. When I met her I thought she was a cuty. Apparently this affection wasn’t mutual since she digged her claw in my carefully stretched hand. However it was in a playful kind of way and she looked quite happy with herself.

I was told that she couldn’t live with other cats and they didn’t want to let her out of the cage otherwise she’ll kill them all . So she reminded me of Frodo and I decided that I would take my chances with her. Getting her in the carrying basket turned out to be a major problem and in the end I received her in an industrial style cage.

Once in the car she calmed down a bit, happily meowing away. This gave me hope for her mood at home. I put the cage in the living room and prepared her litter box. Next I let her loose in front of that box. She quickly moved out of the cage and started to inspect her new home. Every time she passed me she purred a bit and wanted to be stroked.

I had to leave for work but when I got back, she walked towards me. She is very inquisitive and doesn’t stay longer than 5 minutes at the same place. She seems to be very happy and affectionate, so if this is a difficult cat, I’d like to know what an easy cat is.

Loedertje doing her rounds

netatalk and os x playing up

stvn — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 20:58:08 +0000

I’ve spent my entire evening fixing my appletalk set up after I accidentally ‘upgraded’ my handcrafted netatalk with the stock ubuntu one. I crafted my own because the stock package doesn’t support encrypted passwords.

I’ve reinstalled, rebuild and rebooted netatalk on the server and I kept getting this error:

“The operation cannot be completed because one or more required items cannot be found. (Error code -35)”

Googling this error didn’t give me much and it took me a while to realize that googling for: error code -35 will give you no useful results do to the minus sign. In the end I discovered that it is not ubuntu but Apple to blame for the error. Apparently at some point in time the globalpreferences get fcked. So the solution is:

rm ~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist

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

Panoramas

stvn — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 21:10:17 +0000

I found an incredibly easy to use panaroma stitcher tool for OS X; DoubleTake. It is shareware, but worth all the few euri it asks for a license. Just drop in the photos of your panorama and 9 out of 10 times it creates the correct panorama. It works with both photos shot in ‘Panorama mode’ and series of photos shot in series without fixed lighting and white balance settings.

As a result my Panorama gallery is growing fast, working my way through my backlog.

Insanely high mountains

… 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

A rift in the internet

stvn — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 12:30:32 +0000

the evidence is finally there that Google is building its own version of the internet. If you search for images in the Dutch version of Google you have the option to search for images or search “The ‘The internet‘” (het het internet). Not to be mistaken for the common internet, currently in use by billions of peasants. Apparently this is a specific subset of the Internet, probably only with content that Google has approved and/or cached. This might be the new internet without the flaws of the current one, like freedom of speech.

Finally it has arrived the ‘The Internet‘

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