Making long-term timelapse videos

January 10, 2016 3:27 PM

I'm recording a webcam stream, and intend to do this 24/7 for a year. How can I make week/month/year-long timelapses out of it?

The webcam video is an RTMP stream, and saves as an FLV in h264 encoding. I've gotten some promising results using VLC to transcode with a ramped up playback rate, but there seems to be an limit as to how high the playback rate can be. It seems the best I can do with VLC is squeeze 24 hours into a 45-minute timelapse. I could transcode this again with another high playback rate, but I imagine there's a better way than multiple passes of transcoding and degrading the video quality each time.

I'm starting to think that the more realistic approach is to somehow pull out a configurable n evenly-spaced frames out of my saved video streams and stitching them together into a video, but I don't know how to do this. For longer-term timelapses I bet it'd start making sense to only include daytime frames, to avoid rapid day/night transitions. My Google-fu's only led me to people with dSLR setups doing automated timelapses. Ideas?

posted by spreadsheetzu to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

FFmpeg is probably the tool for this job, if you can deal with tricky command line stuff.
posted by MoTLD at 3:59 PM on January 10, 2016

This tutorial shows how to use FFmpeg to save periodic sequentially numbered individual images from a locally connected camera, then in a separate step you turn those images into your time-lapse video. It should be trivial to use an existing video instead of a live stream for the first part. They're rather heavy, but here are the FFmpeg docs.
posted by MoTLD at 4:06 PM on January 10, 2016 [1 favorite]

If at all possible you want to be saving stills, not video, taken at regular intervals. They'll be higher quality, it'll probably be easier to make that into a timelapse, and it won't be as complicated. I've done it several times - including a nearly 1-year timelapse I took.
posted by RustyBrooks at 4:25 PM on January 10, 2016

There was a guy that did something similar when he bought his house; well, when he bought the house on the property he wanted, tore it down, and rebuilt. I didn't really read into all of the technology he used to make it work, but this is his site, and you can read about what he did, and how he did it. I followed a long a little bit as it went along, but even just his final post and the complete timelapse are pretty cool.
posted by GuppieXX at 12:12 PM on January 12, 2016

The ios/android app Lapseit is cheap and excellent, if that helps.
posted by Sebmojo at 4:41 PM on February 1, 2016