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Hello and welcome to my blog. I enjoy messing around creating websites, YouTube videos, blogs and other stuff. I write this blog in my spare time to share my enthusiasm for technology, gadgets and the internet.

18/12/2010

How to make a timelapse using a webcam

The type of webcam used in this tutorial is not a USB one. It's an IP camera or the kind of webcam you might use to look at a tourist destination or anywhere of interest.

First you need to get some images to work with. IP cameras are good because you don't need a computer running to save images or video from them. Most IP cameras have a function that involves saving pictures on a timed interval. It dosen't matter where you save the pictures, on an SD card or on an FTP server are the usual choices. You need to choose how often you want the camera to take a picture. It depends on what you want to see in the timelapse. If you want to see the clouds flowing about in the sky, I would reccomend an interval of 30 seconds. If you want something slower, like a plant growing, you might only take one a day. This is a setting you must set in the IP camera configuration page and varies by model, so I can't give exact instructions.

If you saved the pictures on an FTP server, login to it on your computer and download all the images. If you used an SD card, just copy the pictures over. Put them in a folder on your Desktop for easy access. Then you need to download a program called MakeAVI. After you have downloaded it and uncompressed it, open it up and select your images. Then choose a frame rate. If you took one photo per minute, a frame rate of 15FPS (Frames Per Second) would show 15 minutes of video in a second. After choosing a suitable frame rate, click begin, choose a filname and select a format on the next screen. There will be a list of formats but if you want one that gives good quaity without taking up too much space, choose "XviD MPEG-4 Codec." If you don't have that, you can download it here.

After it has completed, you will have the timelapse wherever you saved it and you can now do whatever you want with it. Put it on Facebook, upload it to YouTube etc.

Hint: Can't find it? It's probably in the same folder as the pictures. You should look before you click save!