Create a time lapse movie on a Mac
A few weeks ago I was exploring options for creating a time lapse movie using a Mac. There are a number of options out their but none of them were quite right. So I created my own. Using two freely available software downloads and a python script I got just what I wanted.
Watch Video
This process creates a Quicktime movie from a directory of images. I really like this approach because it is easy to manage and adjust as you are working.
How-To
- Download InstantShot! at www.digitalwaters.net
- Install it and use it to capture all of the content for your time lapse movie.
- Once you are happy with all your pictures head on over to www.3am.pair.com
- Download and install their QTCoffee package.
- Make sure you can run 'catmovie' from the command line.
- Download pics2mov.py from this page and place it one folder above your images.
- In a terminal navigate to where the pics2mov.py script is copied.
- Run the pics2Mov.py script to create your movie (see below for more details.
Using pics2mov.py
To use the python script you will need to know three things.
- The name of the directory that holds the images you want to turn into a movie.
- The number of second to place in-between each of the images
- The name of the final movie
Those are the three things pics2mov.py expects when run. pics2mov.py targetDirectory secondBetweenFrames outputFileName
example;
python pics2mov.py targetDir/ 3 myMovie.mov