I have talked in the past about how to get a fully working time lapse system on a Mac using a webcam and some command line scripting. That was great but could do with some tweaks to get a more elegant solution which I attempted to reach here.

I wanted to get more use out of my digital SLR camera so I set my camera up on a tripod, connected it up to an intervalometer (my mac) and gained a bunch of files that needed to be processed and turned into a movie. I created the following script to turn my images into a movie.

This script will run on any unix like environment with a bash shell and uses ffmpeg so make sure you have it installed on your *nix machine.

  1. Download images2movie
  2. Change the permissions to allow the script to be executed chmod a+x images2movie
  3. Copy file to /usr/bin/ sudo cp images2movie /usr/bin/
  4. Run by images2movie <directory> 30

If it all goes well, you should see the following output:

Movie generated: timelapse.mov

Some more work could be done to resize images in advance to ensure that ffmpeg doesn’t choke on the image sizes but I will save that for another time.

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