We have a few Nest (formerly Dropcam) cameras that we’ve had pointed at the construction site of our new building. We’re paying for the lowest of the subscription services, the one that gets you 10 days of video storage but not the full “Nest Aware” package. The time lapse videos we were getting from the service were ok, but the cameras are capable of higher resolution than the videos we were getting. (1080 vs 720, I believe.) And there were some pretty unpleasant compression artefacts showing up, mainly in the sky and clouds, which make up a large portion of the frame with some of the cameras. Also, we want to be able to make time lapse videos covering months, maybe a year. I think you can do some of that with the higher priced subscriptions, but you definitely can’t with the cheap one, at least not easily. (The previous idea was to have someone download a daily time lapse every day and then assemble them in Final Cut as needed. That’s a lot of manual work for something which ought to be eminently automatable.)
Here’s what I did to get us the ability to make full resolution time lapse videos of arbitrary duration, over any period of time the cameras were running. I’m using an iMac running OS X, but this should work from a linux system or a Windows system with the right tools installed.
Continue reading “Long scale Nest time lapse videos (part 1)”