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Time-lapse photography compresses a 36 hour car trip from Madison, WI to San Jose, CA down to 12 minutes.

A few years back, my brother expressed to me a desire to make a video composed of digital photos taken every mile along the course of a road trip he was taking. Being an engineer, he made a little contraption that would manually press the shutter release at the appropriate interval. It was my job to work out how to turn those photos into a video. After pausing for a good while to become frustrated by the MJPEG tools, I stumbled across Slide Show Movie Maker. With that, he made a cool video (no, it is not available online)

Skip forward a few years, to a friend and I discussing the same basic project for a road trip to a convention. This time, we had a camera that could be controlled via USB, so need for constantly swapping out memory cards or building a mechanical trigger. With the setup discribed here, videos were made for trips to Origins 2005 and .

With a new job 2100 miles away, I could not resist the temptation to make a video of the 36 driving hour trip.

The Setup

The car was a Volkswagen Jetta. The camera was a Logitech fusion held to the interior roof of the car with the passenger side visor. The camera was hooked up to a laptop running VisionGS. Still frames were grabbed every five seconds (not including stops for sleep).

The Trip

The trip started in Madison, WI, with stops at night in Ames, IA, Laramie, WY, and Reno, NV before ending in San Jose, CA. The trip was about 2100 miles and around 36 hours of driving.

Assembly

With nearly 27,000 1024x576 images and the help of Slide Show Movie Maker I assembled a 12 minute video of the entire trip. The basic process I used was:

1. Set the Default project settings (File > Project Settings).
   • Choose Output AVI location. The fastest disk you have, and you will need a good deal of spare space depending on what encoding options you choose later.
   • Frames Text-Fade-In: 0
   • Frames Showing Picture: 1. Each image will be shown for one frame.
   • Frames Text-Fade-Out: 0
   • Frames fading to next picture: 0. Do not use a fade to go from one picture to the next.
   • Movie-size should be set to the size of your input images. I would not recommend using SSMM to do image resizing. I used Irfanview to batch resize my images.
   • Frames per seconds: 30.
2. Set SSMM Options (Options > Options)
   • Set a temp directry to cache temporary files as you are doing testing. This should be a disk with lots of free disk space.
   • Uncheck "Consistency check before creating slide show". This stops SSMM from checking for the existence of all of the files being used before you attempt to create a video. Not doing this added at least five minutes of waiting after clicking the "Start Creation" button and before I could actually choose my encoding options.
3. Import the photos (Objects > Add Picture Directory). This takes a few minutes to import 27k images.
4. Remove Picture text: Select all of the images (Select All button), delete the text in the "Picture Text" box, and press the update button in the same row.
5. Choose a Fade-Effect: With all of the pictures selected, choose a fade-effect. It doesn't matter which one you choose since it won't be seen with the settings described above. Press the update button next to this option.
6. Press the "Start Creation" button.
   • For preliminary testing, select a start and end position that is only a few hundred images total.
   • Select "Final Production" in the "Quality" pull down box. I did not find that it slowed down video creation any noticable amount. I also didn't notice quality improvements though.
   • Select the two checkboxes that creates cached content. make sure you uncheck these and reset the cache before creating your final versions.
   • Press "Choose Video Codec" and choose a codec. I would suggest toying with xvid or Divx's free encoder. Divx is without a doubt easier.

With a great deal of trial and error, I produced a 1.1 gig 1024x576 version using Divx's free encder with 1-pass quality-based encoding with a target quantizer of 4 (and the Encoding Presets slider set to the higest it would go). The 150 meg quarter-size version available here was produced with 1-pass Rate Control at a bitrate of 128kbps.

Some seriously random observations from my trials: I found xvid to have too many knobs and widgets to tweak and never got a reasonable sized version. I never got 2-pass encoding working with Divx or xvid. I did not find the "Psychovisual enhancements" to make a noticable difference.

The Finished Product

Madison to San Jose (divx encoded avi about 150 megs). Enjoy.

Page Created December 2006