Timelapse

This page covers notes on time-lapse photography. There are twi main aspects to time-lapse photography: the hardware, and the software.

• Hardware - cameras, wiring, instrumentation, weatherproofing, devices, gadgetry, motors, etc.
• Software - capturing images, firmware, storage, networking, wireless communication, control systems

Hardware

Kinds of cameras you can use (for example):

• Raspberry pi camera
• Big fancy cameras

Software

The software used with timelapse photography may have several goals:

• Use drivers to communicate with the camera hardware using whatever processor type (e.g., Raspberry Pi, Arduino, computer) to be able to capture images
• Use drivers to control motors to adjust angles
• Capture an image from the camera (resulting in a JPG file)
• Run a sequential timing loop to obtain a sequence of images (e.g., a Python script)
• Process the images, modify colors or apply filters, and turn them into a movie

Generally these can be broken down into:

• Firmware (software to talk to hardware at a low level, for camera or camera-related hardware)
• Photography (software to actually obtain photographs)
• Post-Processing (software to modify the obtained photographs and stitch them together)

Firmware

On the Raspberry Pi, the firmware end is taken care of by a Python library called picamera - this utilizes the kernel bindings available on Raspberry Pi machines to obtain images from the camera. See the following pages for more notes:

• RaspberryPi/Timelapse
• RaspberryPi/Timelapse2

The short version of the above pages:

• Use Raspbian Linux, not Kali Linux, if you're using a Raspberry Pi
• Install the Raspberry Pi camera libraries
• Ensure the hardware is all connected properly and that everything is seated snugly (particularly the yellow tab on the front of the camera)

Photography

To do a basic timelapse and capture photographs every few seconds, you can start with this stock script:

lapse.py

import picamera
from datetime import datetime
import time
import os

camera = picamera.PiCamera()

lapse_dir = datetime.strftime(datetime.now(),"timelapse_%Y%m%d-%H%M%S")
os.system('mkdir '+lapse_dir)

while True:

    prefix = datetime.strftime(datetime.now(),"%Y%m%d-%H%M%S")
    filename = lapse_dir+"/"+prefix+".jpg"

    camera.capture(filename)
    print "Saving photo to %s"%(filename)

    time.sleep(2)

Processing and Post-Processing Photos

See the Timelapse/Processing page for a detailed set of notes on the post-processing procedure. The basic steps for post-processing images into time-lapse videos are:

• Obtain and wrangle a large number of sequentially numbered jpeg files (xargs)
• Figure out what effects to apply - single jpeg file (lightroom)
• Apply desired effects en-masse - all jpeg files (lightroom)
• Turn mass of jpeg files into video (ffmpeg).