Extremely Cool Unless You Think Too Much About It

So, I’ve done something I’ve been intending to do for quite some time… I’ve always thought time-lapse video sequences were pretty slick and sure enough, I have to say I continue to think that – now, even more, since I made one myself, using my Canon SX100 IS and the extremely cool toolkit, CHDK, an amazing collection of enhancements that clearly illustrate how well open-source can out-innovate proprietary software.

This particular sequence is sped up (head-hurting math alert) 1500x normal speed… one picture per minute, displayed here at 25 pictures per second… so each 1 second of the video is 25 minutes (1500 seconds) of reality… or just slightly over 2 seconds per hour.

Your Natural Question:

Why did you do this?

My Should-Be-Obvious Answer:

In “Hey, Diddle, Diddle,” why did the cow jump over the moon?

Same reason. “Why not?”

So it isn’t a very engaging subject... I figured the combination of cars coming and going rapidly contrasted with the staff vehicles that stay in the same place for hours at a time would make a good juxtaposition.

The short version of how this works is that the camera is set up to take a series of ordinary photos -- but on an automatic recurring basis. Then the magic secret command to stitch it all together looked something like this.

mencoder "mf://*.jpg" -vf scale=640:480 -o timelapse.avi -of lavf -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mjpeg -lavfopts format=avi

YMMV.