Raspberry Pi Time Lapse Photography

[@billywallace1360]

About 30 years ago, a friend of mine set-up his camcorder and left it for a day to take a time-lapse of clouds from a window ledge in the office building where we worked in Glasgow (plenty of clouds here). That was the one day the window cleaners decided to come around, so his clouds time-lapse included several shots of leg silhouettes as the guys clambered around in front of the camera.

[@hugobracamontesbaltazar]

😂😂😂

[@terrydaktyllus1320]

The origin of Mr. Scissors is revealed! He was born in Sainsbury's supermarket!

[@ExplainingComputers]

Yes, the resolution of the HQ cam has revealed his origins.

[@loginregional]

I wonder when Cousin Staple Remover will make an appearance...

[@TheTechieScientist]

Loving the "cloud computing" chapter xD

[@twentyrothmans7308]

It was at that point that I lost it. I hope that Christopher realises how we laud him.

[@parrotraiser6541]

True cloud computing would include a burst in which a quantity of confidential personal information is randomly distributed to an unauthorised audience. Perhaps a flurry of bank statements? (It appears to be an inescapable feature of the original.)

[@ExplainingComputers]

:)

[@loginregional]

This hearkens back to the nineties when I had an RCA editing VHS shoulder camera, which among its features was a variable time lapse selection, that I used on the Hibiscus, on several moonrises over a period starting from full to last quarter, and the sleeping snoring lump. Some people! Well worth the bucks, even better when I mated it to the Proscan editor which made nicely-nice between the two, each capable of controlling the other.

[@tonysheerness2427]

You spark the interest in people and show them how they can do things as well. You are a brilliant teacher. If only we could time lapse the life of a human, from birth to death and condense it into a short movie.

[@ExplainingComputers]

Checkout this video of a "Lotte" growing from zero to 20: kzbin.info/www/bejne/r5fUoaSfibKIe8k It is the best human aging time lapse I've come across.

[@tonysheerness2427]

@@ExplainingComputers Her parents must have the patience of a saint and the organisation of an army, to film her every so often edit it and make a film.. Did they film her in front of a white backdrop or was that photo shot? Some people are simply amazing.

[@ExplainingComputers]

@@tonysheerness2427 Yes, agreed -- amazing organization. I believe it was the same background.

[@andrewd4906]

I often wondered how time lapse was done with a pi. Now thanks to this episode all has been revealed. Excellent video, as always.

[@insanemainstream3633]

Raspberry Pi has opened up the doors of photography on a budget. Thanks Chris!

[@spencervance8484]

Isnt a raspberry pi 4 about $100?

[@AdamJessopmazdamjmx5]

The black dots flickering in your clouds time-lapse video reminds me of the black dots flickering in old movie footage.

[@John.0z]

Excellent timing for this Chris - my new HQ camera should arrive in the next few days! This is most definitely one of the things I want to use it for.

[@MicrobyteAlan]

Absolutely Fabulous episode. Exactly what I was looking for, you’ve given me a lot of ideas. Thanks from overly sunny Orlando.

[@ExplainingComputers]

Thanks for this. If I've given you ideas, then my work is done! :)

[@anullhandle]

Send some sun sitting on the beach getting sprinkled on in NJ.

[@TheClembo]

Thank you, a very different look at 'cloud' computing, I could watch it all day! Thank you for your comprehensive video on time lapse photography and seeing your code now helps explain it a lot more.

[@randallnelson6695]

Now, if we reverse the video we will get a very good explanation of how ice cubes naturally form is a glass of water. Excellent video and creates some interesting ideas for short videos. Thank you

[@ExplainingComputers]

Yes, I should have run it backwards!

[@AnttiNannimus1]

Once again, Dr. Barnatt, you have packed a huge amount, including ALL the necessary detail, of very useful, practical, clearly explained, RPi application development content into a single short video. I continued to be amazed and grateful for your work, skill, knowledge, ambition, and dedication! As a lazy person, I would appreciate a link to your Python source code, but I even understand the tough-love educational value of your decision to make me key it all in myself.

[@ExplainingComputers]

Thanks for this. I've put the code for the intial (ice melt) timelapse here: www.explainingcomputers.com/sample_code/Timelapse.py (link also now in video description).

[@AnttiNannimus1]

@@ExplainingComputers Thank you, I'm very old already, so whatever fat-finger keyboard time you can save me to replicate your work should rightly accrue directly into your own personal lifetime longevity account. I truly hope it is so. But saying that, I admit I'm only cheating myself by not keying it in letter-by-letter myself, and thereby taking that opportunity to actually understand the functions and syntax of all that underlying-code. I always liked programming, but I hated the debugging, and that's what defeated me in the end. I always aspired to get it right in the first place, and never succeeded. It was SO humiliating!

[@skoolspirit1476]

A useful script. Thanks to Chris for sharing his research with us. I always prefer when someone with better skills than I has written and debugged something, rather than me fiddling for hours using my limited skill set, sometimes with zero results (but the experience gained). Even more frustrating when it's a task I'm sure others have succeeded at with ease. I've been looking for a DVR style program that runs on a Pi to grab video from a UVC capture card. Had no luck with any program recognizing the video stream and also having a programmable timer function, I had thought I might use an ffmpeg script with a cron job to implement it, but something similar to this script may work. Thanks again.

[@-iIIiiiiiIiiiiIIIiiIi-]

His projects are just getting cooler and cooler!

[@loginregional]

ICY!

[@srtcsb]

Great illustration Chris. That's a fortune's worth of software, all for free, and the hardware cost isn't really bad at all. This also shows the power of what can be done with minimal programming. Thanks for another great video.

[@elementbr]

A cloudy sky in England - colour me surprised! Excellent video, I've been meaning to test out my camera, this has served as a good prompt.

[@MrNormanross]

Love this video. Created a time laps of sunflowers growing for my 5 year old son and it blew his mind how much they move. Another video in raspberry pi os (bullseye) with camera adjustments for white balance etc would be amazing.

[@ExplainingComputers]

Thanks for this. Your sunflower video sounds cool.

[@WHNorthcote]

I wonder if the Pi camera could also be used as a Astronomy camera like the Skywatcher type of cameras. If it could, it may even help with meteor spotting on clear nights. But it would also require adapting to bright levels during the day and low levels of light at night. The Altair Astro brand uses CMOS chips so there could be a potential for this type of camera working over wifi to be used as a observing camera. So would this work and if it could be done?

[@ExplainingComputers]

I believe this can be done -- in the video where I first looked at the Pi HQ camera, several people noted in the comments that it can fairly easily be fitted to a telescope (the lens attachment is C-Mount), and reported great success taking astronomy images.

[@reggiep75]

For time lapse plant photography, would it be beneficial and more streamlined to have a plant in a black box with IR LED strips (the reels of the stuff) that switch off/switch over to white LEDs for the shots and then back again to the grow lamps/LEDs - rinse and repeat until finished. If I was going to do a plant time lapse project I'd be inclined to try it that way and possibly tape the IR LED strips above the plants and the white LED's in areas where it's needed for a well lit shot and have the SBC switch the lighting over in code.

[@wammo12345]

Another lovely video! I love it when the glass is half full. Thanks you Chris!

[@ExplainingComputers]

:)

[@cyberp0et]

Always a pleasure to watch another video on this channel.

[@ExplainingComputers]

:)

[@RothmanHarv]

The ice time lapse was gorgeous with the glistening droplets. Looking forward to the cress time lapse too; I love watching the sprouts wave around (assuming to follow the sun?) As a possible follow up, could we see a video on a Raspberry Pi stop-motion system?

[@Innocentdarkness72]

Bedankt

[@Innocentdarkness72]

great work , have a nice weekend Sir ......

[@ExplainingComputers]

Thanks for your support David, most appreciated.

[@XCyberAttackX]

Bro everytime I watch any videos from you it gives me a feeling that your life stopped with you by 80's ,,, 😅😅😅😅😅😅 anyone else feels the same?? Thanks for the video! "Like"

[@nemocheerio]

Absolutely great video! Man, if I had a Raspberry Pi when I was a kid, I'd would have been amazing. Too bad I can't get my nephews interested in any of this. Oh well, more fun for me. Thanks for posting these ideas!

[@andljoy]

This is quite cool. You may also want to look at a GPS timeserver project with a Pi , there are other videos but the way you explain things is nice and simple. Accurate time can be very useful for many projects. Now i just need to work out the cheapest SBC with ethernet to do that project for my network :).

[@hal_from_all_nations]

This is one of my favorites videos!. Thanks Chistopher.

[@ExplainingComputers]

Thanks!

[@HoboVibingToMusic]

Ever since that silent mini ITX pc, I've been looking out to build one. I've finally settled for a 300$ (217 GBP) build that'll have 512 (or so) GB SSD, a J4125 CPU and 8GB DDR4 ram! Thank you very much on that idea, It'll help me a lot when I just want to chill w/ videos, movies, or my huge music library

[@ExplainingComputers]

Enjoy your new PC. I use mine every day to watch online content on my TV. :)

[@HoboVibingToMusic]

@Tano oh for sure! I plan to get a 60W one for that mini board. My main PC is just so noisy. My damn AKG K701 are open and I can just hear the machinery XD

[@Capitaine.Albator]

Always fun to watch. The quality of your videos are amazing. Nice resolution. I was thinking about building a All sky camera (there is a Guit hub on that) so I can build one for my place for astronomy and watch for meteorite and fireball. Thanks again for the inspiration. 👍🏻✌🏻🇨🇦

[@AMDRADEONRUBY]

Nice a new video ! As always I'm here I'm pretty sure it's really interesting as ever. Have a nice week Christopher

[@ExplainingComputers]

Thanks, you too!

[@donnanorth7324]

I'd like to see the pi zero time-lapse experiment have motion sensing added, and then installed into an acrylic porch light globe.

[@KitHoongTan]

Great video! Looking forward to the time lapse plants!

[@himselfe]

Another option instead of using a servo and physical shutter for the cress box, perhaps using an LCD shutter panel would work. I believe you can buy them from places like Adafruit/pimoroni etc.

[@ExplainingComputers]

Uhm, a very interesting idea!

[@grantclarke4713]

Thanks!

[@ExplainingComputers]

Thanks for your support, most appreciated.

[@letrainavapeur]

I did something similar a few years ago. Through an East facing bedroom window I pointed it towards where the sun would come up and set the timer to start just before dawn. Over a few weeks I got some very good video.

[@ExplainingComputers]

Sounds very cool.

[@mikiethebikie]

Thanks so much Chris, I am a keen photographer and really enjoyed this episode. 👍

[@BigRedTower]

I used a Pi 3 to capture a year-long time lapse of my front yard at one frame per-minute. Still rolling! :D Fun seeing the sun angles change over seasons.

[@W8RIT1]

I'm interested also in doing time lapse in that time scale as well. How did you do so? It's like to learn how to take a pic at 2 times per day and stitch it together over a year.

[@Chlorate299]

I'm putting to action my plans to make a Raspberry Pi astro cam, getting the feeling I need to learn a bit of Python!

[@AndrewAHayes]

A bit of RGB lighting under the glass and ice would look nice, consider me inspired Chris!

[@ExplainingComputers]

Ah, yes . . . indeed!

[@alexlandherr]

I’ve done a similar but slightly more advanced thing where I imprint a UTC time stamp on each image and have them be captured with as accurate an interval as possible. I got some help writing a custom sleep function for extra accuracy. I now have it running and due to end on 2021-09-30 00:00:00 UTC.

[@perrymcclusky4695]

Another project I’ll have to try myself. Looking forward to your next video!

[@ExplainingComputers]

Thanks and greetings Perry!

[@ElmerFuddGun]

To make it better, how can we get the used exposure time at the start and use it for all the frames? That would prevent the camera library possibly changing it every frame.

[@ElmerFuddGun]

Or maybe we can just manually set the exposure at the start via the command line?

[@SchoolforHackers]

Once again you provide such pleasant schooling, Cristopher. You do such great work.

[@MichelMorinMontreal]

Christopher Barnatt: the synthesis between art and science!

[@alittlepeaceandkarma]

For the crest project you can go on holiday next summer to the artic circle so it won't be dark for a few months. You can do time lapse on a phone now.

[@alanthornton3530]

Hi Chris thank you for another excellent & informative video, it shows how versatile the Raspberry Pi is. I use Kdenlive to put together slide shows in Linux Mint which turn out really well, the time lapse photography is even more impressive. Also it's good to see Mr Scissors in the spotlight.

[@lorderectus1849]

Mr SCissors ✂️ is the star 🌟 of the show!

[@ExplainingComputers]

Always.

[@LordWillyGee]

That camera doesn't come with an autofocus lens, does it? Great time-lapse study project.

[@SkyTechMusicStuff]

Thanks for the video Chris, great content greatly explained as usual. I've been using a couple of Pi+cam (one is a 3B, the other is a ZeroW) for quite a while now to do full-day timelapses of the sky, so it's a topic that's sort of familiar and of great interest to me. As I was watching the cloud timelapse in the end I noticed that there's a red "circle" of discoloration in the center, that I clearly remembered was a problem when I got started with my timelapses. Turns out the solution is simple when using raspistill to do the captures, you just add the -st commandline parameter and through some sort of coding magic that I took from the raspistill docs and commented in my script as "passing stats for dynamic lens correction", the red circle dissapeared and the resulting image was really good. Since you're using python to do the captures,it'll probably be good to investigate if such a command/parameter/option exists, otherwise to do timelapses of content that could be color sensitive (such as grey/white clouds are), perhaps raspistill should still be used. In my project I take both an image of the East and West sides of the sky from a building, and also use a temperature/pressure sensor to log the data to have it visible along with the captures, in the future I'd like to add wind direction+speed and perhaps the amount on rainfall, but that requires a bit more time and probably more maintenance. This setup has been running for more than 2 years for the West camera and more than 1 year for the East camera + temperature + pressure, I don't share the URL because I don't want to spam, but I could post it if is of interest to someone since it's very related to the topic of the video. Thanks again for all the effort you put in your videos, the result is certainly great!

[@ExplainingComputers]

Very interesting -- I will try the lens correction thing. Thanks! :)

[@oskar3514]

Great video. I wonder how difficoult it ,ight be to run a timelapse on a Pico.

[@matteomorelli3465]

Hi Cris, will you do a video about optical fibers (standars, connectors, etc)? Thanks!

[@lastinline1958]

Wow! Class A video, there. Very instructive, and fascinating, too. Thanks, Chris!

[@ExplainingComputers]

Thanks! :)

[@rogerkoh1979]

Time lapse video is interesting. Quality is good too. PI is great for lots of things.

[@johnc3403]

Lots of great information there Chris, well done and thank you.

[@dobosliviu-george8004]

You never disappoint! Big like.

[@ExplainingComputers]

Big thanks!

[@richardlyd7450]

Really interesting episode....it's amazing me what these SBC can do

[@PeterFrueh]

Another excellent video. Lots of ideas for things to do in lockdown Melbourne Australia.

[@negirno]

Maybe one could make a whole stop motion animation with this setup? Also, a new test video featuring home-made timelapse stuff?

[@projectmalus]

@Tano For me that would be a good thing, force me to work quicker :)

[@jayjayjones2380]

Wow, I might actually be able to do that! Carefully done👌

[@PixelisedPaul]

Are PAL and NTSC frame rates that important these days? TV's all support 60Hz so from what I understand there's not really any importance any more, but I may be completely wrong.

[@jankomuzykant1844]

It's not only PAL/NTSC frame rate, it's also a mains voltage frequency (50/60 Hz)

[@jankomuzykant1844]

@Tano You think only about watching a video, but forgot about recording - try 60FPS with 50Hz flickering (not so old) LED lamp

[@Jimwill01]

Great video, great fun! Now you might consider doing one of time lapse of the 3D printer!

[@Reziac]

Oooh. Now that would be fun.

[@Druac]

Awesome video…been waiting for this one…more great time lapse ideas…thanks for taking the time to make great content!

[@tommytomthms5]

your 750 frame example is fun because if you set the total time to one day, it would take 25 minutes to play one days worth of frames. as opposed to 25 minutes to capture what would take 30 seconds to play.

[@santiago13ful]

There is another way to do this, more user-friendly for those that dont want to use the terminal or or write python code. there is a software that's ubuntu (and anothers flavors) has pre-installed called "cheese", it has an option to take bursts of photos and you can even set the time during each photo.

[@chriholt]

That was a lot of fun, and the results were great! Thanks Chris.

[@airjuri]

I have raspi taking photos for looong timelapse. it started about 3 years ago, takes one pic per minute. It takes about 300MB per camera per day. Currently 2 cameras taking pictures. Looks like i have to upgrade my NAS HDDs bigger very soon :D

[@brianthorburn4957]

Great video, always look forward to a sunday and your videos

[@rwprime1]

Excellent as always, but how did you get it to sudo shutdown now without asking for a password?

[@rasaskitchen]

Nice video. Thank you. You could also add a button via GPIO to shutdown pi if you are done with timelapse earlier.

[@ExplainingComputers]

Yes, that would be a very good idea. And ideally a "Take timelapse" button also, which when pressed would increment a variable to add to the file name to allow multiple time lapses to be taken.

[@MalachiTheBowlingGod]

Nice! Don't forget: using a sleep function doesn't take into account any camera processing time, so you may experience drift - something that may be significant under certain circumstances.

[@kyoudaiken]

My Pi weather station also takes this into account. It's still not accurately every second aligned to the clock. But I truncated the microseconds portion of the datetime value from the database, so it LOOKS like it was measured at that exact time, even though it's about 10-20 ms off. It doesn't matter much, but Python is extremely slow cause interpreted, and you will NEVER get it accurate, ever. There will always be a bit of a drift with Python.

[@TheTrophyStore]

Hi Chris Great video, do you have a video on pi cameras and patten recognition, eg arrows, cross, circles, logos... I'm looking to make a pick and place machine. Thanks in advance Roy

[@linuxgeex]

Isn't there a V4L2 interface for the camera which could then be referenced by ffmpeg, then set -fps 1/60 and -ofps 30 or whatever you like?

[@ExplainingComputers]

I believe so -- there are many ways to access the Raspberry Pi cameras. :)

[@VTHTECH]

I enjoy your videos very much, i've learnt a lot and reinforced my love for computers with your videos. Regarding timelapses i've been experimenting with command "convert" on linux trying to automatically convert them to avi or gif. It works but so far the performance is very slow. thanks for your videos they are awesome.

[@HKey_Root]

Super and no knotted twine to steady the camera!

[@ExplainingComputers]

:)

[@SuperDexter212]

He is making difficult work look so easy that now I am thinking about start learning coding and do same projects like this.

[@fahadus]

It's not work if you're having fun!

[@SuperDexter212]

@@fahadus well it depends on motivation and interest, Nothing is impossible.

[@jimmihenry]

The zoom on the second melting ice cube vid was achieved in post using Kdenlive? Could the zoom have been done by the raspberry Pi while taking the images?

[@ExplainingComputers]

Yes, the zoom was done in post by setting keyframes for the zoom. To do it in camera would have required the camera to move, or to have a motorized zoom lens.

[@bananaskin7527]

Thank you. Well presented. Looks like anyone could do it. Like in 'personal computing', or maybe Byte magazine.

[@TerryForeverYoung]

Hi Christopher. Love the channel I have been toying with adding an M.2 to my Pi4, but my biggest problem is that the storage is so big but I only have 2 distros on my SD card (Raspbian and LibreELEC/Kodi). Is there a way to manually add in new boot partitions/images, so I could add more distros selectable at boot without destroying the existing ones that I have set up?

[@annaliseketz1984]

Thank you for this wonderful video sir! I have a question. When I run the code, I cannot get the camera to stop even when I hit Ctrl+C. I've tried Esc, Ctrl+X, and Ctrl+Z as well. How do I get my camera to stop when I click Ctrl+C? Is there a way I can code in a stop? I've had to shut down my pi every time so far and none of my frames saved. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[@viccie211]

The birds make the clouds video look like it's having old timey film blotches

[@JeromeDemers]

could we have a script to make that time-lapse video for us and generate .mp4 file? I am sure there is some info on the web for this.

[@Colin_Ames]

Excellent video, as always.

[@gaptastic]

Great video!!!! I think I might take a shot at this. :) Thank you!

[@Super8Rescue]

I'd love to use this for scanning cine film, how easy would it be to trigger the camera to take a shot, from an optical sensor?

[@ExplainingComputers]

It would be pretty easy -- I cover using an optical sensor with Raspberry Pi GPIO inputs in Python in this video: kzbin.info/www/bejne/hHLPXoiCesanqtk

[@Super8Rescue]

@@ExplainingComputers Oh thank you for that. I will enjoy watching that, as I enjoy all of your videos. Many Thanks

[@DarkRedman31]

Could be interesting to link it to a pi weather station and capture frames to generate seed noise and to sometime use it to seed it a classic RNG as an alternative of RNG combined with lava lamps.

[@ExplainingComputers]

Indeed!

[@ludwigvanbeethoven61]

Hi, got a question. Could you maybe explain how to run a raspberry pi with different power sources, such as solar panels, in a car or with batteries? Thank you!

[@PatrickConstant]

I can't produce a sky time lapse video because in France the sky is allways blue... Nooooooooo... Thanks Christopher, I think I will use it for the fun, but not only. We are waiting for your next production impatiently. Best regards

[@KowboyUSA]

Python makes a versatile little Raspberry Pi camera!

[@nick-qw2zh]

Wow , Great video, really well done and explained….. as always, thankyou

[@fawzanfawzi9993]

This is great, now I can see how the dead rat in the attic decomposes and gives off awful smell.

[@EcoHamletsUK]

How do you record a timelapse of the smell?

[@siddiousuk]

Brilliant! Thanks for this, you've inspired me to give it a go!!

[@cattivello]

Really interesting. It has been a project on hold for long ti e for me. The editor is what I missed Question: Can we achieve the same results with motion eye? Would that be an alternative to write a script?

[@kerkkolappalainen2494]

what about using old webcams to meka security system or slow timelapse differed angles.

[@felderup]

what i'm interested in is sync, several cameras taking photos at the same time to something like smpte.

[@RONSPOTZ]

Is there a way to make a dashcam from a Raspberry Pi? If so, could a GPS be integrated to show speed and direction?

[@Ragun5]

Hm do you think it would be possible to build a star tracker with a raspberry pi?

[@ExplainingComputers]

I imagine so! :)

[@boryshacker]

How about shooting in raw and compensating the flicker directly in camera?

[@RichardGreco]

Great video! I am hoping you can do a tutorial on the raspberry pi pico, collecting data with ADC and transmitting that data to another computer.

[@CasanovaUnlimited]

About the only missing video taken by an RPi now is a real time video of a glass of ice being used as the RPi's heatsink.

[@ExplainingComputers]

:)

[@CasanovaUnlimited]

@@ExplainingComputers Thanks for your reply. I would also think the RPi would bring the glass of ice water to a rolling boil but I doubt the Pi can get THAT hot.

[@qzorn4440]

several years ago, 80-90s? a magazine article had a project using a cheap linear diode array from a flatbed document scanner. pointed it towards the moon, left it run for hours? as the earth rotated, got a low resolution image of the stars..:) it was interesting and something i should of setup for fun and learning...:/ now for your interesting hi-tec hobby video, thanks...😀