365 Day Time Lapse

[oilydan]

Hi.

I'd like to make a 365 day time lapse of my garden and thought about using my GoPro, plugged into power in my shed and mounted to the roof (pretty rural so no real chance of theft).

It looks like the GoPro, however, can only do intervals up to 60 seconds. Even on a low resolution setting this is too much for even the largest of SD cards!

Is there any way around this without having to buy additional hardware or without having to go to the camera every day to take a picture!! Better still would be the ability to switch on the camera and take a picture manually remotely (if connected to WiFi) as I work abroad most of the time!

Any ideas?

[Moonhawk]

How much can a go pro store with a large SD card.

If you take one frame every 60 seconds - that works out as

60*24*365 = 525,600 frames.

This is just under 3 hours of footage at 30fps.

According to this website - a Go Pro with a 32gb SD card can record over 8 hours of footage at 720p and 30fps.

http://gopro.com/support/articles/recording-time-i...

[FurtiveFreddy]

Moonhawk said:

How much can a go pro store with a large SD card.

If you take one frame every 60 seconds - that works out as

60*24*365 = 525,600 frames.

This is just under 3 hours of footage at 30fps.

According to this website - a Go Pro with a 32gb SD card can record over 8 hours of footage at 720p and 30fps.

http://gopro.com/support/articles/recording-time-i...

But the GoPro records JPEG images in timelapse mode, not video so the storage requirement will be much, much more.

525,600 jpgs in 5M mode will require about 2100GB!

Personally, I would forget the GoPro and use a camera on a cable linked to a CCTV-style DVR or a PC running some software to do the job. Don't forget a nice big UPS to keep it all going in case of a power cut.

Edited by FurtiveFreddy on Wednesday 18th March 11:57

[Freakuk]

Clumsy but you could swap th memory card in the GoPro between shots if set to 60 seconds at any time, download the images and re-use the memory card. So you would need two cards in total, swap them every day say and download the images.

[Moonhawk]

FurtiveFreddy said:

But the GoPro records JPEG images in timelapse mode, not video so the storage requirement will be much, much more.

525,600 jpgs in 5M mode will require about 2100GB!

By 5M I assume you mean 5 megapixels. Why would you record a timelapse with such high resolution?

If the timelapse was recorded in full HD (1080p) this is little over 2 megapixels per image and if recorded at 720p resolution - it's under 1 megapixel per frame.

The OP hasn't specified which model of go-pro they have - so I don't know just how low the resolution can go (some offer WVGA resolution) or how large an SD card the camera can support (some models support up to 64gb).

The best thing for the OP to do is take one frame in timelapse mode at the lowest resolution and see how big the jpeg file is. That will then tell them just how long they are likely to be able to record. A lot of factors are unknown - not least the compression ratio the camera uses for it's jpegs.

Edited by Moonhawk on Wednesday 18th March 12:12

[Colin RedGriff]

FurtiveFreddy said:

Personally, I would forget the GoPro and use a camera on a cable linked to a CCTV-style DVR or a PC running some software to do the job. Don't forget a nice big UPS to keep it all going in case of a power cut.

Edited by FurtiveFreddy on Wednesday 18th March 11:57

I think is probably the best way. If you have a Synology NAS that has a security module that will link up with a ip enabled webcam. It's intended to do video but you may be able to set it up to do a timelapse

[FurtiveFreddy]

Moonhawk said:

The OP hasn't specified which model of go-pro they have - so I don't know just how low the resolution can go (some offer WVGA resolution)

Which ones give WVGA in stills mode?

[FurtiveFreddy]

Colin RedGriff said:

I think is probably the best way. If you have a Synology NAS that has a security module that will link up with a ip enabled webcam. It's intended to do video but you may be able to set it up to do a timelapse

Yes, I've done this before with a Netgear NAS & Axis IP camera. I set it to grab frames when movement was detected but you'll be able to set it to automatically grab frames at regular intervals.

That's probably the cheapest/simplest way to do it. And you'd be able to easily monitor it remotely.

Check out iSpy software as that has lots of useful features for that sort of thing.

[Magic919]

Raspberry Pi and a camera would be cheap and versatile.

You need to strike a balance when picking how many photos to take a day. Video length of 2-3 mins is enough I find and any longer gets a bit dull to watch.

Grab the images using a cronjob, stitch together using ffmpeg.

[madmupps]

I'm coming round to Moon at the camera once a month.. You should see seasonal changes in both Flora and fauna.
Stick that in your Go-Pro!

[Tuna]

Much of the Cannon range can be remote controlled. We did a 3 week timelapse of our housebuild, and for that I bought a cheap canon P&S from ebay (thirty quid), a mains adaptor and a security camera enclosure to put it in. Wired it all into an old PC and there are a number of programs you can get to manage timelapse. They automatically download to the PC hard-drive, so you can take as many pictures as you like. Just left it running for the duration and then stitched together all the pictures. Some of the packages can control long term zoom and even panning rigs if you want to plan out something unique.

It's worth working out your picture rate - long videos get boring quickly, but you might want to be able to 'slow down' the action at interesting times of the year (spring bloom and so on). Sorting out all the pictures is a major undertaking, so it's probably worth breaking the job down into shorter periods that you can then stitch together.

You'll also find that spiders LOVE camera enclosures, and things like cleaning off dust and rain marks need to be done carefully to avoid moving the image.