Continuous Capture Settings for Time-lapse

rickscully
rickscully
edited January 2021 in SecuritySpy
Hello. I am playing with time-lapse options in SecuritySpy and I have a question about the Capture Rate settings.

In the manual the description reads: "(e.g. 0.1 FPS to capture 1 frame every 10 seconds)."

If I wanted to capture 1 Frame every 30 seconds is it 0.3? What about every 60seconds?

Thanks.

Comments

  • Ben
    Ben
    Hi Rick - 1 frame every 30 seconds is a frame rate of 0.0333 and 1 frame every 60 seconds is a frame rate of 0.0167. Just divide 1 by the number of seconds to get the frame rate.
  • rickscully
    rickscully
    edited February 13

    Returning to this because I still don't quite understand. I want to have a resulting video at 30 fps that is approximately 2-5 minutes long (depending on sunrise/sunset).

    My first test was a capture rate of 0.1 and a playback rate of 30fps. This resulted in a 7 hour long Timelapse. Not ideal. heh.

    Also, is there a way to have the final video be mp4 instead of m4v?

    Essentially I am trying to recreate the Timelapse videos I am currently creating via EvoCam. The resulting videos can be seen: https://www.youtube.com/@VTFarmCam/videos?view=0&sort=dd&shelf_id=1

    I really need to get SecuritySpy to work as I can't rely on the abandoned EvoCam to continue to work on my M3 iMac.

    Math is not my strong point, so please share as much detail as you feel you can. Thank you!

  • Ben
    Ben

    A 5-minute movie is 5 x 60 = 300 seconds long, and at 30fps this totals 300 x 30 = 9000 frames.

    Say you have 10 hours of sunlight per day: this is 10 x 60 x 60 = 36000 seconds. To get 9000 frames out of 36000 seconds, you need a frame rate of 9000 / 36000 = 0.25 fps.

    So in fact your 0.1 fps capture rate is reasonable (this would result in a 2-minute movie assuming the same 10 hours of daylight).

    Note that by default, video data from the camera is saved directly to movie files (for most efficient processing), and therefore any capture rate that you enter will be ignored (because this can't be applied in this case). I suspect this is the reason why you ended up with a surprisingly long file. There are two solutions:

    1. Continue using Continuous Capture movie recording, enable the "Recompress video data" option for this camera under Settings > Cameras > Device. Recompression is what allows SecuritySpy to change the frame rate of the incoming stream for recording.
    2. Capture still image files instead, then use a utility such as Time Lapse Assembler to create the final movie.

    Note that .mp4 is basically the same as .m4v; the latter is simply Apple's preferred file extension, hence this is what we use in SecuritySpy. If you like, you can change the file extension to .mp4 and it will continue to work just fine.

  • rickscully
    rickscully

    Thanks, Ben. I am still very confused, but will try a few settings. I already have recompress video on, but it is disconcerting to see yellow warning symbols. Makes me assume I am doing something wrong. And each test takes over 24 hours to accomplish. And I am never sure which setting it is that is not working for me if it fails to do what I want.

    I have automated all of my process and I don't want to add separate steps. In EvoCam I have it set to grab an image every 10 seconds and then at midnight it makes a video at 30fps from those images. It automatically deletes the old files too*. I don't want to have to manually stitch images together using yet another piece of software. Ruling out #2 in your list above.

    *My disk is already filling up with images. Can SS be set to not keep a new set of data for every day? This is another challenge for me as I can't automate it so my process finds a differently named image in a different folder every single day.

    I can save the resulting files in a directory and have that video automatically upload to YouTube, but I don't really want to add another step to rename the file to .mp4. PLUS as I said above those files add up and get large and eat into my DropBox data usage. I use DropBox and Zapper to automate the uploading process to YouTube.

    Feels like I take one step forward and another back each time I attempt this. As you can see I have been trying for literal years to get SecuritySpy to do the things I do easily in EvoCam.

    As I wrote this I am starting to realize this just still may not work. I have read and re-read the documentation but am at a loss to figure out how to make my very simple process work with such a robust piece of software as SecuritySpy. But I have no other options available to me -- that I am aware of. And I have been looking for years.

    SIGH

  • Ben
    Ben

    While it is possible to achieve what you want with SecuritySpy, your use case is unusual, and it will require the tweaking of a number of settings in order to get everything configured appropriately to produce the output you want. Here are my recommendations:

    • Ignore the yellow triangle warning for the recompress option - this is mainly warning about the additional resource usage required for recompression, but at such low frame rates this won't be significant.
    • It sounds like movie capture is going to be your best option, not image capture.
    • Under Settings > Cameras > Continuous Capture, turn on the movie capture option and turn off the image capture option.
    • If you don't want to keep these files on your disk for very long, you can also specify here a maximum age to keep these files, in the "delete old files after" option.
    • For the "create new" option, select "daily at midnight" to ensure you get one movie file per day.

    The above should result in one timelapse movie file per day. In terms of the upload to YouTube, I'm not familiar with this process. But I can tell you that the .m4v files that SecuritySpy produces are not any different in format to .mp4 files - we just use Apple's preferred file extension for them.

    One function that may be useful for you is to get SecuritySpy to run an AppleScript when the file is finished (i.e. at midnight every day when the files roll over). In this script, you can do things like change the file extension, and move the file to a particular place. See the "ProcessCapturedFile" example on the AppleScript Examples page. We can help you create an appropriate script if you need.

    If you have any issues getting SecuritySpy to create these files as you want them, feel free to email us and include a debug file (SecuritySpy menu > Debug > Create Debug File On Desktop) and we'll review your settings and provide feedback.

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