Back in 1999, or so, I had the idea to create a video of my drive to Burning Man. I was thinking about using Linux and a quickcam to create a time-lapse movie of the trip. Here are some examples of what other folks have done [1], [2], [3]. I sketched a number of things like camera mounts and system diagrams, but it needed to ratttle around in my brain awhile longer. Sometimes I just need to wait until the right set of tools come along (Mac/iMovie), or for my skill set to broaden.
Back in March I needed to quickly set up a webcam so I could monitor some work that was going to be happening in our backyard. I found EvoCam ($25). I put my camcorder on a tripod, ran a firewire cable from the camcorder to my PowerBook, fired up EvoCam and fairly quickly figured out how to capture video.
I set it up to do three things:
1. Let me watch the activity in the backyard, from my work, via the build-in webcam server
2. Define a motion sensor that would capture 5 seconds of compressed video when triggered
3. Use the same motion sensor to capture images that were concatenated into a time-lapse video
Wow! It really worked well. The built-in webcam server was easy to use. Later that evening, I watched the time-lapse video. 9 hours of activity reduced to a ~6 minute movie. If there was a section I wanted to see in more detail, I made note of the time (I added a date/time overlay on both videos) and found that section in the 5-second/trigger movie. That movie was ~2.5 hours long. When there was enough motion to keep the motion sensor triggered, the video was continuous. I would give sizes of both movies, but I converted them to MPEG-4 format, and didn’t keep the originals. As I remember, the file sizes were quite reasonable. Compression settings can be tweaked in the EvoCam app, in addition to a number of other things.
The geo-testing crew was great. As you can see, our backyard is heavily landscaped. They were able to do their work and avoid the heavily planted areas. Had a question come up, I told them to give me a call and point out the area in the yard — figuring the webcam would save me from having to drive home and see what the issue was.
In the timelapse section of the movie (click the image above to view) you can see our black Manx cat, Zinny, trying to get some attention from the guys. She’s such an affection mooch!
More on capturing driving video in part two…