Timelapse

My first timelapse, just to check the basics. As Guillaume tried with Open Source softwares, I did too, but that's a very very simple one.

First the result:

As you can see the video ratio is 4:3 and there is a big fisheye effect. Why? Because I used a GoPro to take pictures. I could have reduced the fisheye effect by cropping the video and taking only the middle of it and at the same time crop it with a 16:9 aspect ratio… but I didn't 😉. I also could have removed the firsts and lasts pictures since they are a bit shaky.

There is also no music. I will do that when I will do a "real" timelapse.

Here is how I did:

  • Take a lot of pictures with a camera (GoPro camera have a timelapse mode, I set it to take one picture every 10 seconds).
  • Start Kubuntu.
  • Install ffmpeg: sudo apt-get install ffmpeg
  • Create a directory and put all the pictures in it.
  • Rename all the pictures with numbers only like this: 0001.jpg (in Dolphin just select all pictures, press F2 and enter ####).
  • Create a video from the files: avconv -r 24 -i %04s.jpg -vcodec libx264 -s uxga timelapse.mp4

Quick explanation on avconv:

  • -r 24 sets the framerate to 24 images per second.
  • -i %04s.jpg takes pictures starting from 0001.jpg as input.
  • -vcodec libx264 encodes the output video with H.264 video codec.
  • -s uxga sets the output resolution to 1600×1200 (keeping the 4:3 ratio).
  • timelapse.mp4 the output file.

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  • From Laurent ·

    Here is an other example using the cropping video filter:

    avconv -r 24 -i %05d.JPG -vf crop=1920:1080:1000:700 -vcodec mpeg4 -b 10000k -r 24 timelapse.mp4
    • The first -r 24 sets the input framerate.
    • The second -r 24 sets the output framerate, since I'm using the same I could have omitted it.
    • -vf activates video filters.
    • crop=1920:1080:1000:700 takes a 1920×1080 rectangle with its upper-left corner at 1000px from the left and 700px from the top.
    • -b 10000k sets the output bitrate.