Last night and tonight I've been learning about time lapse photography on my laptop. Here's what I did, adapted from the tutorial here.

  • Make a folder:
  • mkdir ~/Desktop/cap
  • cd ~/Desktop/cap
  • Install streamer:
  • sudo apt-get install streamer
  • Capture images:
  • streamer -o 0000.jpeg -s 300x200 -j 100 -t 500 -r .01
  • -t is the number of frames we want to capture
  • -r is frames per second (so -r .01 is a photo every 100 seconds and -r 1 is a photo every second)
  • Install ffmpeg
  • sudo apt-get install ffmpeg
  • ffmpeg -i %04d.jpeg -r 30 -s hd480 -vcodec libx264 -vpre hq time-lapse.mp4
  • This is compressed
  • ffmpeg -r 12 -i %04d.jpg -vcodec copy time-lapse.mp4
  • This is uncompressed

And here's the end result:

Sprouting Lentils Time-Lapse from Jonathan Ellis on Vimeo.