The weather here can certainly be dramatic. Here’s a video I made of a pretty intense day and a half starting on the last day of March. I had anticipated that all the snow would melt and, after a bit more, it did.

I noticed an interesting subtle thing about this video — I’m wondering if the vertical orientation of the camera changes because of thermal expansion of the supporting tower as the sun comes out and tracks across the sky. Looks like it to me!

What’s cool about this video is how easy it was to make. It certainly required less effort than writing about it. I used the following to create a directory to store the images in, retrieve 1000 of them from a Niagara International Transportation Technology Coalition webcam at two minute intervals, and finally encode them into a video with ffmpeg.

D=/tmp/freeway ; mkdir $D ; cd $D
URL=https://www.nittec.org/liveimages/CCTV_625.jpg
for N in $(seq -f "%04.0f" 1000); do wget -O ${N}.jpg $URL ; sleep 120; done
ffmpeg -i %04d.jpg -r 15  -qscale:v 2 buffalo.mp4

If you have a Raspberry Pi with a camera module you’d like time lapse images from, you can substitute this command for the wget line.

raspistill -t 120000 -tl 120000 -o %04d.jpg

Pretty easy! If you have a favorite webcam that you’d like to make a time lapse video of, now you know how.