In front of the place I work, Ghent University is constructing a new building with two large auditoria and office space, called "Het Ufo" (Universiteitsforum). Being in the digital age, there was of course a webcam pointing at the construction site. Since 21 September 2007, I had a cron job running to capture a photo each day. Apparently, the cron job died on 18 august 2009 for some reason, so my pile of daily photo's stopped growing. Time to put them together in a time-lapse video:
Update: Michiel Ronsse (see comments below) also had a cron job running and kindly provided me with extra frames from July 2007 to September 2007. This is the part when there is no concrete yet.
Making of
For more nerdiness, a bit of making-of info (all on Linux of course).
The bash script to capture a frame from the publicly accessible webcam (which I won't disclose) was:
filename=~/ufo-webcam/frame-$(date +"%Y")/frame-$(date +"%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%S").jpg
wget -O $filename --timeout=60 http://webcamurl 2>&1
With cron, I executed this script once a day, generating files like frame-2008/frame-2008-02-20-12-27-00.jpg
To generate a video from this, I used the command line tool transcode. First I had to generate a list with the filenames of the frames:
ls */frame-200?-??-??-12-??-??.jpg | sort > framelist.txt
And then "convert" this list file framelist.txt to a real video:
transcode -i framelist.txt -x imlist,null -g640x480 --use_rgb -z -y xvid,null -f5 -o frames.avi -H 0
I don't remember what all the options are for, but they were needed to make it work on my setup.