A super quick howto on creating timelapse movies from commandline.We used to create timelapse videos, using the Canon CHDK, originally tempted by our Manhattan Skyline view some years back. Some of our videos still posted here. We have been on hiatus for a loong while on creating those, since we moved further away from the gold coast, and life got in the way, and iPhones happened, so our PowerShot was gathering dust in a box.

Last snow storm all the trees around us had their branches al touching the ground, bent with weight of snow. The pines are super flexible, bent but not broken in action. With the news of a new snow storm coming, I put our old camera and chdk back in action. Impressive in itself that all just worked, after several years idleness, and I could remember how to put chdk timelapse in motion.

After 6 hours of picture taking, next step was to process the images. As old workflows long disappeared, I decided to try a more canonical commandline approach, and the usual suspects of image manipulation and video, ImageMagick and ffmpeg seem to work perfectly for a simple end result.

This is all i did to create the timelapse from may Mac: 

canomac$ convert IMG_* 20180321_SnowTimeLapse.mpeg

I needed the following prereqs via brew:

canomac$ brew install imagemagick
canomac$ brew install ffmpeg #Needed for creating video

This is by far the simplest way to create an ok output, w/o any additional tools to deploy. There are surely some ways to improve like size, fps, etc. I can update this if I ever get to experiment with them. The end result of this is as below:

[End-to-end flow: Canon PowerShot, CHDK, powerline battery, single commandline w/ ImageMagick+ffmpeg.]