Thanks to Andy Hudson Smith’s webcam timelapse tutorial at Digital Urban, we were able to make the following timelapse, shot over 36 hours with the Logitech quickcam 9000 which offers a 1600 x 1200 resolution. This is perhaps not the best time to create a timelapse as the weather of late has been a tad grey at best, however we are positive for the rest of the year as the system is setup now, and we do get some good sunsets here, so roll on spring !
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Whats interesting about this timelapse is just how much traffic goes by my window in a day.
In case you have not seen Digital Urbans tutorial, here is a quick description.
Equipment:
Logitech Quickcam 9000
USB extension cable
Laptop + external hardrive
Software:
Booru WebCam 2.0 (windows)
Gawker (Mac)
Quicktime Pro
Method:
Set up your webcam with your desired timelapse view. Open booru webcam software, right click and select camera options, select the ‘Image and FTP’ tab. Here you can set the capture interval and the images format, PNG is best for a minimum loss of quality. Check ‘enable save image’ box and browse to the folder where you would like to store your images, and choose a filename. All the images will be saved to this folder and will be numbered in order. There are other options to explore like image and text overlay, and a ‘general’ settings tab, that lets you enable a preview window or ghosting, which just seems to ghost the preview screen.
….And thats it, check your images are appearing in your timelapse folder, and leave for as long as you like.
When you are ready to view your timelapse animation, simply open Quicktime Pro, and select ‘Image sequence’, browse to your image folder, then select the first image. Quicktime Pro will now load all the images sequentially and play at whatever frame rate you have selected.
You can now export this out as a .mov .flv or many other movie formats.
Tip:
To add music to your timelapse movie, select ‘file’, and choose ‘open file’ find a music track and click ‘open’. A Quicktime player will open in a seperate window with your music track, click ‘edit’ and choose ‘select all’ then ‘copy’. Now go to your timelapse movie, go to ‘edit’ and ‘select all’ then click ‘add to selection and scale’. This should overlay your music track over your timelapse, which will play nicely in your exported movie.
