Episode: 1449
Title: HPR1449: Timelapse Video
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1449/hpr1449.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 03:08:55

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You
Good evening, my name is Peter or periscution 4. Some people might know me from the Colonel
Panic Olga. Now a few episodes ago or actually it was episode 1,344. The Kenney Sun made
a video of dinosaur egg hatching and at the start of the video you could see that there's
a lot of flicker or strobe effect. Now Ken managed to control this by closing the curtains
and adding his own ambient light. Now that's all well and good if you're making a video
inside but if you're outside then you obviously can't control that. Now hopefully in this
episode we'll discuss the problem of flicker or strobe in palm lights. Video is firstly
how you can prevent it with the correct settings in your camera and secondly if you do happen
to get some user deflicker script that was written I think in Perl that I found on the
internet. But anyway let's first have a look at time lapse and the initial setup and some
of the equipment that you're going to need. Well you probably can do time lapse video
with a compact camera. You're going to need one that can take an image that you know
over 15 or 20 seconds at some predetermined interval. I'm mainly going to concentrate on
digital SLR. First of all you're going to need a tripod because this typically you're
going to be taking images over an hour, two hours, four hours so it could even be a whole
day. Secondly you're going to need a interferometer which sounds like a pretty impressive piece
of tip but virtually all it does is automatically pushes the button, the shutter button for
every 5, 10, 15, 20 seconds depending on how you know what you set it up for. I tend to
shoot an image every 5 seconds that's going to give you you know 24 frames every two minutes.
So virtually one second of your video represents two minutes of the real world. This is something
that you need to play around with an experiment and it will depend a lot on your subject matter.
Okay so now I've got the camera set up on a nice 30 tripod with taking an image. Well
we haven't actually hit the shutter button yet to start taking this because what we've got
to look at is setting the camera up to help prevent this time lapse flicker. Now what we're going
to do is take the camera at an automatic mode and put it in manual mode. Now you want to set your
shutter speed. Now typically one one hundred of a second or less. If you're taking video of
like a city scape and something where you have people in it, one of the effects that you'll notice
often when you do look at time lapse video with people and the buildings and that are nice and
crisp but the people are slightly blurred and this is actually a pretty good effect and this can
be achieved by even having a slower shutter speed. Maybe I don't know about one 30th or second perhaps
one one eight even as long as you're you're sitting on a nice solid tripod your buildings and
fixed structures are going to be still very clear but any cars or any anything with motion are
going to have their blurring effect and it can be quite a pleasing effect to put into your video but
once again what you've got to do is experiment with it. We've got we've got that we now we have to
look at aperture. You want to close your aperture down a bit because otherwise you don't want a
two shallow depth of field but once again there's something you need to play with. Get you put white
balance right and these rules aren't setting concrete because as we know it's a juggling act
between aperture shutter speed and of course the ISO depending on the available life but
I would recommend that the first thing you do is set the correct aperture then look at shutter speed
and then of course last resort then then just change your ISO and I know I've said this plenty
of times and I'll say it again it's an experiment experiment and just see what's going to work on the
the other important thing is manual focus because you don't want to set it on automatic focus and then
something and then someone walks through your shot or whatever and then the camera focuses
close and then it focuses far away that's not something you're looking for. The important thing here
is put everything in manual mode. One problem you will run into is if you're going to try to shoot
a sunrise. Now obviously you can't leave your camera in manual mode because it'll start off
that you'll set it up for you know very where it's dark at early in the dawn and then the
sun starts to come up and start to get brighter. Images are going to be way out you know just over
exposed and get blown out the bugger in after a while you want to be able to see anything but just
to be white hazing your photo. So what you have to do then is probably set it up in aperture priority
and let your camera select the best shutter speed so you get the correct exposure. Now the other
thing too that I don't shoot in raw when I do shoot in JPEG I don't even shoot in my highest JPEG
quality because what we're going to do is convert the images down to the 1080 by 1920 or HD
resolution to you know because you don't want any better than that there's no point because you
be showing these you know typically on a telly or if you're uploading them to YouTube or whatever
you don't even know that's sort of quality. So you're not messing around with you know 8 meat
fire else there's really no need to shoot in raw and less you really want to sit down and go
through them and make some really minor tweaks and then of course you're going to have to do a
batch conversion on which really thousands and thousands of photos. One particular instance I did
shoot in raw was when I was shooting the Milky Way in crux or the Southern Cross as I passed
overhead. Now because obviously this is late at night with nothing but starlight that I shot
at in raw and then did some enhancement and used I think it was you for raw and the batch conversion
to make some changes to the gamma and brightness and saturation etc. So have a look at your subject
and the style of time after and you know once again now it's just experiment with it. Okay so
we finally got our camera set up and depending on what you take in a picture it's probably time
you know to use in a volumeta and start your timer and off it goes and leave it for what could be
an hour three hours or even you know I've taken literally thousands thousands pictures all day
when I've been doing some construction work like putting the pool in the building in
deck around it that's something I wanted to document but depending on what you do one thing for
certain you're going to return your camera turn it off look at your counter and see you have
literally taken hundreds to thousands of pictures. Now the next thing is what are you going to do
for more? Well I'm glad you asked. Now firstly you know obviously copy them over to your computer
of laptop whatever runny Linux. Now if you run them Windows I'm afraid I can't help you. Now after
you've copied all the images over to a folder on your computer first of all you're going to make
a directory called resize then we're going to use magnify which is part of the image magic
packages to resize them down to 1920 by 1080 or you might want to make a 720p film or whatever
but in my particular case I make them all HD resolution. Now rather than sitting on a
rattle off a bunch of commands I'll put it in the show notes how eventually we'll use either
mencoder or ffmp to finally render our video but okay so now that we've resized and we've
magnify and hopefully this next step because we took the time to set up our camera that we
totally didn't get any flicker but if we did I found a script and I know I'm going to butcher
this bloge name but it was by a Ben jealous Tassoolus and I'm sorry Ben jealous if you listen
but here at the script and like I said I'm pretty sure a pearl if you have a look in the show notes
we'll put a link to it I'll either put it up on the kernel panic server or can I put it
someone on the hpr server because I tried to find it again and I can't and I can't recall where
I originally got it but anyway it'll be there in the show notes a link to it and it's called
time lapse the flicker pl all we have to do now is use mencoder or ffmp or any other favorite
applications that you like to convert a bunch of images into a video I've mentioned a few
of the things I've used time lapse for and I'll also link a couple of them in the show notes
or if you just do a quick search for Peter 64 Linux or one word time lapse you'll find
quite a few on my YouTube channel okay so hopefully this is made a couple of years
to get out try your hand at time lapse video thanks for taking the time to listen to me this has
been Peter 64 for hacker public radio you know talk to you next time get a my name is jude
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