Jan
4
(2007)
A Month and a Half in Banff (via timelapse)
Filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: banff, photography, webcam.
The Sulphur Mountain Gondola in Banff runs a great hi-def webcam. I’ve been syphoning images from it via a cron job every 5 minutes in order to make a time lapse movie. I’d originally intended on just doing a week or two. Then, I forgot about it, and the automated cron job continued quietly curling images onto my hard drive for 6 weeks. Just shy of 1GB of jpeg images.
It’s really quite depressing just how much of the movie is dark. Black, depressing northern winter night. I left it in, just in case I do a summer timelapse for comparison.
I fed the images into QuickTime Player, and convinced it to compress it all down to 130MB of timelapse movie goodness. It’s not full resolution - the original is 1280×720px, and compressing that down enough to not fill a fiber optic line resulted in such a crappily artifacted movie that it was unwatchable. I downsized to 768×576px while simultaneously screwing up the aspect ratio. Just pretend I used the magic Oprah slimming cameras 
As an added bonus, there are two frames of fireworks on New Year’s Eve. Now, let’s put the Dreamhost bandwidth and disk space allotment to the test…
I might have to try making a DVD out of this. It’d be cool to have running in a loop in the background…
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12 Responses to “A Month and a Half in Banff (via timelapse)”
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That IS cool! I think I saw myself - was there in the lower right corner on Dec 30th!
Brilliant stuff - mountain pr0n ;O)
That is just freakin’ amazing. Let’s hear it for forgotten crons! It played fast south of the (.ca) border.
Cron job? A bit geeky sounding for me. That said, the result of your work is very cool. There are some great educational applications here.
Anyway to “de-geekify” cron job so us mere mortals can make take advantage?
That is a really cool sequence and a very dramatic point of view. If your interested in time-lapse you might want to check out GBTimelapse, software for remote capture using Canon cameras.
Very cool - it’s very fast here in Oregon.. I’d love to see the cron job, or parts of it..
GBTimelapse looks pretty cool, but alas is Windows-only. No dice.
I’ll try to take some time to clean up, document, and post the script I used to download the images. It’s really a trivial script, only a few lines of code (and could be refactored to a single line if I cared about that sort of thing).
Hi I’m also trying to do a cron job to do the same kind of thing, having issues reading the remote image I think because it comes via an IP?!
Would be great if you wouldn’t mind posting (or emailing) your code for your cronjob there
Jimbo: Just use wget, it’s even available for windows. When you have all the images, you can assemble them using ffmpeg.
I just used curl.
Here’s the shell script I used, which was added to my crontab so it ran automatically.
Save that as an executable script, and add something like this to your crontab:
In this case, it’ll run the script every 5 minutes, saving the file as something like 2007.02.03.11.05.jpg
Almost forgot. After spending the time to capture and process the timelapse of the Sulphur Mountain webcam, I found this site that provides timelapse movies of many webcams (including sulphur mountain…)
That is bloody amazing! Love it. Do you think you could go and do that in Chamonix please