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Timelapse of iSight wakeup captures


A few months back, we wrote about reader Dylan's iSight autocapture project-- he rigged up the code to have his iSight on his MacBook Pro snap a photo every time the lid was opened (and even released all of his work as open source). At the time, he mentioned eventually combining all of the photos together into a timelapse video, and seven months later, here it is.

Unfortunately, he says the Sleepwatcher daemon he was using doesn't work as of 10.4.10, so the project is over until it gets updated, if ever. But he did share with us how he compiled the images together into a timelapse-- he punched out a Perl script (which is reprinted after the jump) to rename all of the pictures into sequenced filenames, and then squished them together with Quicktime's "image sequence" feature. Very nice.

#!/usr/bin/perl

$iteration=1;

foreach my $file (`ls *.jpg`) {
chop($file);
system("cp $file sequence/$iteration.jpg;");
$iteration++;
}

A few months back, we wrote about reader Dylan's iSight autocapture project-- he rigged up the code to have his iSight on his MacBook Pro...
 

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mathie

OK, so I've done the same thing, and hadn't thought of putting it together into a movie before. So, iMovie to the rescue, we get:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdu0yLAgVj0

which is a little less frenetic. :-)

August 31 2007 at 10:01 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
x-f

Hmm.. I'm on 10.4.10 and my Sleepwatcher still works just fine. The only thing, that stopped working after I upgraded from .8 to .10, was DeepSleep widget.
Actually I did that take-a-picture-with-iSight-on-wake-up-and-upload-it-to-my-webserver about half a year ago by myself. For security reasons, of course. :) And because it was easy.

August 30 2007 at 11:47 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Aux

Hey, thanks for the seizure!

August 30 2007 at 4:36 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
bitweever

That got parsed out. It should say:

while ($fname = <*.jpg>)

Let's see if this works.

August 30 2007 at 1:56 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
bitweever

This guy doesn't seem to understand file globs in Perl. This is much easier:

#!/usr/bin/perl

while ($fname = )
{
rename ($fname, ++$i . ".jpg");
}

August 30 2007 at 1:51 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Officerdick

Dosent this guy know any girls :P

August 30 2007 at 9:39 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Josh

oops! here's the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-W3hwfhwes

August 29 2007 at 8:54 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Josh

I've been playing around with something like this too. I've been snapping off a shot every morning with my iMac's built-in camera and uploading it to my flickr account using flickrbooth. I was waiting till I got to 365 days before I tried figuring out how to make a movie out of the sequence but thanks(!) TUAW for tipping me to the Quicktime trick. You can see my results here:

August 29 2007 at 8:52 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Mike Harris

Unless I've misunderstood what you mean by the Sleepwatcher daemon, I'm on 10.4.10 and mine is working just fine.

August 29 2007 at 7:56 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
G

Decent concept. Unfortunately, not entertaining. At the end he realizes he has a jumble of random images which play too fast and have no punchline, so he throws in some slower snapshots outside of the gimmick. And?

August 29 2007 at 7:21 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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