Creating a Time Lapse Movie

[jimmythegeek]

We have a web cam that is taking pictures of an adjacent building every hour. When we are done, we want to make a time lapse of the project. We will have anywhere from 1500 to 3000 pictures at an average of 30k ea (that's right, 45 - 90 mb).

I did a test in flash with about 40 pictures. 1 picture per frame, lowered the frame rate to 4 fps. It worked wonderfully, however, the .exe was about 1.4 meg, with only 40 pics, what is going to happen when we have 2000?

My question is, is Flash a good product to do this in, or is their other products that would work better. I downloaded an evaluation copy of Director, but the file was even bigger on that, and the .dir file was 34 mb, compared to a 1.2 mb .fla file in Flash. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance. Jim Lunde
compugeeks@hotmail.com
Custom Application Development

 

[davdesign]

Is this for a CD-rom (I assume it is because you mention exe)? There's another possibility before I express my thoughts on the Flash issue. Have you considered Adobe Premier?

As far as Flash goes, how about creating movies with 500 pics in each and at the end of each movie inserting a Loadmovie action to prompt the next movie to play? ie: the exe contains the first 500 at the end of which it loads the next 500 into level0, and so on. Flash will stream the output regardless, maybe not as efficiently as the likes of Realplayer et al, but if you're using it for a multimedia cd-rom then it should have no problems.

dave davdesign@pinkzeppelin.com

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

 

[jimmythegeek]

Dave,

Thank you for your response, and sorry for the delay. This is actually a file that will go on the network. It may go on a CD at some point, but not initially.

Do you think having 500 photographs in a flash file is ok? It seems like alot, but if Flash can handle it, then it's fine with me.

I will check out Adobe Premier as well. Jim Lunde
compugeeks@hotmail.com
Custom Application Development

 

[davdesign]

jimmy

it all depends on the size of the image. Some of the movies I am testing for pinkzeppelin.com contain over 1000 images at 250x180 using Flash as the player, (with a preloader they're taking 4 mins to download in full) and the quality thus far has been excellent. But using flash involves displaying the movie by jpeg-frame-by-frame rather than the more advantageous codec option you could achieve, although integration within a website for streaming options could be problematic (and using Realplayer is useless because half of the web population doesn't have it---I don't have it because it is a 'crashing' liability).

dave

dave davdesign@pinkzeppelin.com

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^