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

Trackbacks

Trackback specific URI for this entry

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

Comments

Display comments as (Linear | Threaded)

David Fischer on :

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

Add Comment

Name

Homepage

Comment

In reply to

Phone*

What is zero plus nine?

Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (*word*), underscore are made via _word_.

Standard emoticons like :-) and ;-) are converted to images.

To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly.
CAPTCHA