Help me find software to speed up recorded movie files for time-lapse.
February 9, 2010 10:56 AM   Subscribe

How do I speed up a movie I recorded for hours so it's like a timelapse? My cameras and video cameras don't support time-lapse so I'm looking for a program that can speed things up by a determined speed factor. Free would be preferable!

I've got a few digital cameras and video cameras but none of them are compatible with those external timer things that allow you to take a picture at set intervals. Also the video camera doesn't have time-lapse functionality built in.

I'd like to do some time-lapse videos, one of me sleeping at night (no worries it has nightvision), or a big snow storm blowing in, clouds blowing across the sky...Filming for hours etc is not a problem but finding a way to speed up my video is. Windows Live Movie Maker doesn't seem to have the functionality and I don't have anything crazy like Sony Vegas to do heavy editing.

Is there a program out there that will simply speed up a video to a factor you decide?
posted by PetiePal to Technology (15 answers total) 4 users marked this as a favorite
 
iMovie 6 (not iMovie HD) supports this, if you can get access to a mac. I'm pretty sure you could also do it with ffmpeg/mencoder, which are command-line tools. A quick google reveals this tutorial, which is written for Linux, but the commands should be pretty similar for the Win32 ffmpeg binaries.
posted by Alterscape at 11:00 AM on February 9, 2010


Response by poster: No access to a Mac :) Should have clarified I only have Windows-based machines. Main systems are Windows 7
posted by PetiePal at 11:02 AM on February 9, 2010


Are any of your digital cameras Canons? The included software with my XTi does this, or you could run CHDK on one and do it that way.
posted by sanka at 11:07 AM on February 9, 2010


I've got a few digital cameras and video cameras but none of them are compatible with those external timer things that allow you to take a picture at set intervals.

Are any of your digital cameras Canon models that are supported by CHDK? If so, you can load it onto your camera and run a time lapse script to take photos at set intervals (among the other neat things you can do with the CHDK firmware).
posted by burnmp3s at 11:07 AM on February 9, 2010


Response by poster: Yes to both.

I have the Canon Vixia HF-S11 and Sony Handycam HDR-XR520V.

Also have a Canon Powershot 1200.
posted by PetiePal at 11:12 AM on February 9, 2010


Since this thread is already open I, for one, would like to know how to do this in a non-vendor-specific way. Thanks!
posted by ZenMasterThis at 11:14 AM on February 9, 2010


Windows Movie Maker (free download from Microsoft) can speed up video. You can apply the "Speed Up, Double" effect to a video clip multiple times to speed up by a factor of 4, 8, 16, etc.

Windows Live Movie Maker is a different program, and I don't think it has the Speed Up effect.
posted by moonmilk at 11:18 AM on February 9, 2010


I just noticed that you use Windows 7. Windows Movie Maker 2.6 is rated for Vista, but I use it on Win7 and it works fine.
posted by moonmilk at 11:19 AM on February 9, 2010


Response by poster: Yes Windows Media PLayer will also speed up the video and I've tested it but it doesn't work great. What I'm looking to do those is have the final outputted video be all sped up and play normally. I'm looking to record 8-24 hours in some cases, so the speed up function wouldn't work well enough for videos of that time length.
posted by PetiePal at 11:24 AM on February 9, 2010


Via the always-helpful videohelp: VirtualDub can do this, too.
posted by rhizome at 11:26 AM on February 9, 2010


Yes, I have used VirtualDub to do exactly this. It's a great piece of software if you can get your head around all of the options. I'm afraid I can't give you specific instructions, though, as I haven't played with it in some years. I haven't looked recently, but a few years ago it was free, Windows-only and ran perfectly on XP.

I have a feeling you need to go digging around in the video filters menu looking for something like "decimate frames", which will let you tell it to e.g. keep every 24th frame and discard the rest ("decimate by 24"). Note that you're NOT looking for options to do with changing framerates, as you want to delete frames rather than just change how quickly they're displayed.
posted by metaBugs at 11:46 AM on February 9, 2010


Response by poster: I was just reading over that. Looks like there are 64-bit versions now which means if it ran fine on Vista should be ok on Win7 too. I'll give tht a try tonight, just wish there was an easy program to do it all in :)
posted by PetiePal at 11:49 AM on February 9, 2010


Does Quicktime Pro 7 exist on Windows?

If it does, here's what I do for TV shows (so that I can watch them in 3/4 the time). Should work exactly the same for what you want to do.

Open the movie in Quicktime.
Select All
Copy
Edit the file to the appropriate amount of time by cutting off the beginning or end.
When the movie is the right length, Add to Selection and Scale.
Show Movie Properties.
Delete the first video and audio tracks.

Done. Works incredibly well and even maintains the proper pitch for the sound. Haven't tested 8-24 hour long movies, but I have condensed 2 hours to five minutes flawlessly.
posted by smersh at 12:36 PM on February 9, 2010


I'll piggyback on this question to ask: is there an easy way to use VirtualDub or some other freely-available software to do the same thing, except blending the frames together rather than simply dropping them? e.g. if I'm speeding up the video by a factor of ten, I want each frame of the output to be an average of ten frames from the source video.

I've managed to approximate this with a combination of VirtualDub's "interpolate" and "temporal smoothing" filters, but it's hackish and only works properly for speeding up by a power of two.
posted by teraflop at 4:55 PM on February 9, 2010


teraflop: I'd look for a way to take every 10 frames, give them each 10% opacity, overlay them, then output that to a single frame. I'm sure Vdub could be scripted this way. If not, you could certainly take a video file, output all frames as jpgs, then batch process them in GIMP or similar, then reconstitute the resulting frames into a time-lapse video through many tools (google "time-lapse from jpgs" or something like that. there's a bunch of ways).
posted by rhizome at 3:16 PM on February 10, 2010


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