Time Lapse Video

I completed my first ever time lapse video with my web cam today.  It didn’t turn out too bad, though you can really tell I have it on the inside looking through a window and screen.

I setup this webcam to upload an image once a minute to my linux machine.  Once I had all the images, I ran the script below.  It takes all the images generated and  names them sequentially.

ls *.jpg | nl -nrz -w4 | while read a b; do mv "$b" $a.jpg; done

Once you have all the image files named correctly, you can run ffmpeg. I’ve included my sittings here.


ffmpeg -r 10 -b 2048k -bt 768k -i %04d.jpg out.mp4

Equipment/Software:

  • D-Link DCS-920
  • ffmpeg

Posted by Chad Dotson

A small town Computer Scientist / Software Engineer. Chad enjoys writing Python and JavaScript as well as tinkering with his Raspberry Pi and Arduino. When not programming, he enjoys Photography (especially lightning) and Sci-Fi.

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