Time-lapse using Surveillance System video? - Help with speeding it up?

[Sunbaby]

Hello gang! Not sure I put this in the correct forum - so please move if need be.

I have been trying to figure out a way to record my pool build and speed it up so I can share the cool videos like you guys have. The hubs wasn't excited about spending $400 on GoPro - so I went to plan B. We have a surveillance system that has 2 cams in the back yard. I finally figured out how to save it to my desktop - but it is true video .mov (not pics like time-lapse). So it is BIG, I am hoping to figure a way to make it download to an external HD - but the settings on the system are not very user friendly. I think my work around would be to manually move the file it to an external as soon as it finishes downloading.

OK so here is my question. I need to figure out how to speed it up a LOT. I imported it into iMovie (Mac) and figured out how to speed it up X20 - but that isn't going to be enough. The clip I was playing with was about 3 1/2 min long and sped it up as much as possible and it was still 11 sec long. If my math is right - an 8 hour day would still be a 24 min video?

Anyone have success in this? Any FREE software? I keep finding fantastic software that is $$. Any help would be appreciated!

 

[tim5055]

What about running it through the process you already used a second time? Or, if that is too fast, do the first run at a lower speed X10 and the second pass at whT you need to get where you want.

Just and idea....

 

[Sunbaby]

I never thought about that. Let me try it. I have never used imovie before - so that may work perfectly!

 

[crabboy]

You can try to use ffmepg to split the movie into frames every x second(s) and then reassemble it into a movie. It is not a novice tool, but with just two commands, you can probably get what you're looking for. I just tried it on a short avi clip and it worked well.

Download ffmpeg binaries for your mac: http://ffmpegmac.net
Drop the files into a folder

I took the commands below from these two links. First is to extract a frame every x seconds, the second it to assemble them back to a movie.

https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Create a thumbnail image every X seconds of the video
https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Create a video slideshow from images

These command assume that both the large video and the ffmepg files are in the same directory. Also, that your command prompt is open to that directory. Change the BackyardPool.avi filename to the name of your large video.

$ mkdir tmp
$ cd tmp
$ ../ffmpeg -i ../BackyardPool.avi  -vf fps=1 out%d.png
$ ../ffmpeg -framerate 5 -i out%d.png -c:v libx264 -r 30 -pix_fmt yuv420p timeLapse.mp4

You can play with the fps= and the -framerate to achieve the look you are after.

 

[bobodaclown]

Instead of recording it as a movie record images every 10 seconds or so. Then compress the images to a movie. That's what I've done in the past.

 

[HDClown]

Time-Lapses are created by taking still images and turning it into a movie. Trying to create a time-lapse from a video is kind of the wrong way to go about it, but if you could speed it up enough, you can get the same effect as a time-lapse. Your surveillance camera/DVR should have a way to capture still images based on motion detection (or just continually). Use that setting, then use something that will assemble it into a time-lapse video.

Time-lapse duration is based on the number of frames in a second you capture. If you're using still images, and take 1 picture a second, the resulting time-lapse will be 2x as long as the time-lapse created by taking 1 picture every 2 seconds. Although, you can always speed up the time-lapse too.

Anyway, try GoPro Studio. You don't need a GoPro to use it. When you import the .MOV it will get converted to GoPro's CineForm intermediate format and create an .AVI. From there you can speed it up and then save it out to a final format. I've sped up some of my time-lapses 800x in GoPro Studio. Not sure if it has a max limit. Just be aware that if you speed it up too much, you might not really be able to see much change as it goes on.

You don't need a brand new GoPro to shoot time-lapses. You can do it with a low cost webcam too like a Foscam 720p cam for $100'ish. You can set the webcam to capture on motion and if you get a model that has an SD card slot, it should be able to save that to the SD card, which eliminates the need to setup an FTP server on your computer. That being said, the quality of a GoPro will be vastly superior, but you don't need a brand new HERO4 either. A Hero 2, 3 or Hero 3+ will do you just fine, and you'd be surprised how inexpensive you can get them on Craigslist and eBay. You don't need the newer GoPro's that can actually assemble the time-lapse video in camera, you can use GoPro studio to assemble it from the still images, it's super easy.

 

[Sunbaby]

Thanks guys!!!

 

[zea3]

The simplest way would be as Tim suggested. Edit in Imovie, save it, open the saved movie as a new project, edit again, save again, until you have the result you want. Keep a master of the raw video in case you decide you want to go a different direction with the editing. I'm not positive but I think if you load the video into photobucket it will give you options to reduce file size.