Create Time lapse with FFMPEG and Windows
A recent project I worked on was to create a time lapse of the building of my brother in-laws house. The camera itself was basically a Raspberry Pi that was set up to take a picture every half hour from 6 am to 9 pm. This was accomplished with a simple cron script that ran based on the time of the system clock. There was some drift because it was not connected to the internet and could not get any information from NTP. So it was all based on the time that was set after booting, and since it was powered by a solar panel and battery it could be set up for 3 months without interruption. The only downside was that the 16GB USB stick could not store all the photos for the entire time the camera was taking pictures. It also acted as an access point with a WiFi card so you could SSH into it and monitor the photos folder or download some images without having to take the camera down.
When it was finished, there were a total of 6145 photos, spanning just a little under six months. I found the easiest way to create a time lapse from that many images was to use FFmpeg. It works a little different on windows as it does on Linux, because it doesnt actually install anywhere and it is just an archive file that gets extracted. After downloading, it placed it in a folder called tools on the C: drive and opened the command prompt in C: oolsffmpeg in. (Note the bin folder... That is where the executable for FFMpeg is.)
The command to compile the video was:
C:ffmpeg in>ffmpeg.exe -f image2 -framerate 15 -pattern_type sequence -start_number 0001 -i C:ImagesIMG_%04d.jpg C:Outputvideo.avi
-f image2 is the input format
-framerate 15 is setting the video at 15 frames per second
-pattern_type is for using filenames matching the glob pattern set in -i
-start_number is telling FFmpeg to start at image number 0001
-i is the input files, with %04d setting the number with four digits
At the end of it all, I had a pretty nice 5 minute time lapse at about 300 MB in size.
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