Webcam and Daily Movie

[Minoic]

Hello all,
Has anyone tried to merge/join the hourly created movie files into one time-lapse movie , in an automated way?

I know that one alternative could be Evocam which I have tried but it is a resources hog on my Mac mini that runs WeatherCat.
Also, I tested the standard QuickTime Player and I could merge the files but unfortunately this is a manual operation.
Any ideas?

Another issue is that there seems to be no way to stop WeatherCat creating hourly movies during the night although this is possible for the image files.

Have I missed something in the Wiki or the documentation? I'm not a programmer nor a mac specialist but I learn fast if directed to the right option.
All comments/ideas are highly appreciated.

Thanks
George

[elagache]

Hi George and WeatherCat fans,

Has anyone tried to merge/join the hourly created movie files into one time-lapse movie , in an automated way?

I did give this matter some thought, but there isn't a very easy way to do it.  The closest I could come up with is that there are some UNIX or LINUX command line video tools that will run on OS X.  You could then use either AppleScript or shell scripting to collect the files and have these command line programs do the splicing of the video files.  Finally I gave up because Weather Underground provides a time lapse of your webcam if you upload to them.  So I use that on my website:

http://www.canebas.org/Weather/Canebas_webcam.html

Scroll down to the bottom of the page for the Weather Underground movie.

It has been a long time since I've looked into this though.  There might be some new shareware that can do this more easily now.  Anybody else got an idea on this question?

Cheers, Edouard 

[WCDev]

Not that I know of, I use the 'drag all the daily files to the QuickTime player and then save the resultant movie' approach.

It isn't possible to completely disable the webcam at night - on-line uploads can be switched off in the preferences, but it'll still carry on recording locally.

[Doc]

I will try, but please note, this has been a busy week and my brain is pretty fried at the moment! 

I use EvoCam to pole my camera.  I let EvoCam generate a time lapse move that is 24 hours long and based on a single frame every 5 seconds.  My time requirement varies with the weather.  During severe weather, it's 4 seconds, but during dead weather periods of no clouds and such, it's 30 seconds.   A 4 second time lapse movie will take up about 16 gig per day in file space, but during heavy weather the results are quite impressive.  My cameras have always been very low lux, usually about .00001 lux at present, this is enough to record the night sky clouds, some stars, and the occasional meteor shower and ISS flyby  .

EvoCam will let you record the movie, and it will also take each frame and save it as a .jpg file, the movie can be saved in one place and the .jpg can be saved in another.  The name for the .jpg can be set to the same name all the time and placed in the WC update folder for uploading to your website and WU at well.  Just tell WC where and what it is.  Just go to WC preferences, choose webcam and enable it.  Choose Local File and tell it where it is and what it's named.    Under the movies, I tell WC to make it's own movies for the website and not to save them, I also don't save the individual images either.  Even with 10TB of space, I have my limits 

Hope that Helps!

Doc


Working on the Weather part of the Communications Truck again.  Just no computer tie-in this time.

[Minoic]

Stu, Edouard and Doc,
thanks for the replies.

Doc,
the lowest I can go on lux with my Mobotix M24M is 0.005 but I can also see stars and the ISS fly depending on how much of the local Raki I drink... .
I also have a lots of TBs available and that was not the issue. What I need is an automated way without having to use Evocam or forcing WeatherCat to control video stuff. Thanks for the help anyway.

Edouard,
once again you are the star. Why didn't I think of Wunderground before? I already configured the Webcam to upload the images to WU directly without bothering WC with this action. I guess that by tomorrow we'll see the first time-lapse on WU. WU station ID is IRETHYMN6. Thanks again.

Stu,
WC rocks anyway so I'm looking forward to the next release!!!


George