Cheap time lapses with gphoto2

Stephan Paukner :: syslog

Saturday, November 28. 2009

Cheap time lapses with gphoto2

“Cheap” should mean here that you don’t need to spend money on extra hardware like a remote timer or on extra software like Windoze (which Canon’s EOS Utility depends on). With a GNU/Linux system, just install gphoto2—in Debian, take version 2.4.5 from ‘squeeze’. After attaching your e.g. Canon EOS camera via USB, you can issue the command

$ gphoto2 --auto-detect --force-overwrite --capture-image-and-download --frames 360 --interval 10

to automatically shoot and download images for a time lapse, in this example every 10 seconds for one hour. You should keep all exposure values constant and switch to a lower resolution in advance. You can render an HD video e.g. with

$ mencoder mf://*jpg -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:mbd=1:vbitrate=7200 -mf fps=25 -o timelapse.avi

If you make it bad, it might look boring like my very first try:

091128_timelapse.flv

If you make it good, it should look like this.

My hope is that I can use gphoto2 with an Android smartphone.

Posted by Stephan Paukner in GNU/Linux, Photography at 20:39 | Comment (1) | Trackback (1)

Defined tags for this entry: gnu-linux, photography, software, time lapse, video

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Stephan Paukner :: syslog on : Cheap time lapses, II

Some quotes of myself from four years ago: &#8220;Cheap&#8221; should mean here that you don’t need to spend money on extra hardware like a remote timer or on extra software like Windoze [...] My hope is that I can use gphoto2 with an Android smartpho

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David Fischer on :

Thanks you for usefull tip ! Linux have great tools I like it more and more

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