Filed under: Multimedia, How-tos, Freeware, Macbook Pro
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++;
}
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
James C. said 2:04PM on 8-29-2007
hmm
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BJ Gilbert said 2:11PM on 8-29-2007
I would love it if that still worked... I want to do that and upload/email the pictures for security reasons.
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EBone said 2:47PM on 8-29-2007
Anybody else notice an unusually high number of shots with no shirt on? At least I'm hoping it was just the shirt that was missing...
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MNJayW said 3:17PM on 8-29-2007
@3, I didn't notice the shirtless images, but I did see that he really likes to wear the blue dress shirt for work A LOT.
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iGO said 3:38PM on 8-29-2007
I've never posted a message like what follows, ...ever
Pointless, dumb, not entertaining, useless video.
What a waste !
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sam said 3:56PM on 8-29-2007
so does this work up to the uploading part or does it now work at all?
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bleaus said 4:30PM on 8-29-2007
I was hoping I wasn't the only person who noticed the lack of a shirt in some photos.
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Goran said 4:38PM on 8-29-2007
Hehe, fun to see the beard growing... growing... growing... and then get shaved off again :)
I'm a bit into stop-motion (or time-lapse) myself, so I like the effort. It's hard to watch when the frames are so different from each other, though.
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Tony Bowman said 6:09PM on 8-29-2007
cool project, but perl was unecessary for the renaming/sequencing of photos, though. automator would have handled that jsut as easily.
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artifex said 6:44PM on 8-29-2007
In case people haven't seen Noah's 6 year time lapse:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6B26asyGKDo
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Evan said 6:50PM on 8-29-2007
gay...
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G said 7:21PM on 8-29-2007
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?
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Mike Harris said 8:14PM on 8-29-2007
Unless I've misunderstood what you mean by the Sleepwatcher daemon, I'm on 10.4.10 and mine is working just fine.
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Greg G said 8:28PM on 8-29-2007
Tell me when he fixes it, I've wanted this utility back for quite a while X_X
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saketini99 said 8:54PM on 8-29-2007
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:
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saketini99 said 8:56PM on 8-29-2007
oops! here's the link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-W3hwfhwes
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Officerdick said 9:40AM on 8-30-2007
Dosent this guy know any girls :P
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Greg said 1:51PM on 8-30-2007
This guy doesn't seem to understand file globs in Perl. This is much easier:
#!/usr/bin/perl
while ($fname = )
{
rename ($fname, ++$i . ".jpg");
}
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bitweever said 1:56PM on 8-30-2007
That got parsed out. It should say:
while ($fname = <*.jpg>)
Let's see if this works.
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Aux said 4:37PM on 8-30-2007
Hey, thanks for the seizure!
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