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2009-01-23

TimeLapse for the iPhone - A First Look

TimeLapse is an iPhone app that automates the operation of the iPhone's camera to help create time lapse photo sequences. TimeLapse stores the photos in the iPhone photo library so you can easily download them to your computer and create a movie using applications such as Apple QuickTime Pro, Windows Movie Maker or ffmpeg.

We downloaded it last week and have put it through a few first tests. If it wasn't for a fundamental flaw in the way the iPhone names images it would be almost the perfect pick up and go TimeLapse tool. Annoyingly at the moment the iPhone names images in sequence up to 1000 and the goes back to the start, so with a timelapse of over 1000 images you end up with a file sequence of 1000_1 1000_2 etc which means that the files need to be renamed before imported into any of the programs above.

That said, we think have found a way round it using some Windows freeware, more on that later next week. Our first example is embeded below - it was a horrible day with fast moving clouds but you should get the idea:


iPhone TimeLapse Test from digitalurban on Vimeo.


By simply turning your phone on and running the software you can get some interesting sequences - its the easiest way we have found so far for creating timelapses. Hopefully the image naming issue can be ironed out, until then its not too much a hurdle and for £1.79 it makes TimeLapse a must buy for any iPhone owning image sequence fan.

You can buy TimeLapse directly from the Apple App Store.

6 comments:

  1. Thanks for the heads up on this one, I have had a play and I think its going to be great fun!

    In terms of the renaming heres a Perl script that should do it for you:

    ---
    #!/usr/bin/perl

    $iteration=1;

    foreach my $file (`ls -tr *.JPG`) {
    chop($file);
    system("cp $file $iteration.jpg;");
    $iteration++;
    }
    ---

    and the ffmpeg command:

    ffmpeg -f image2 -i %d.jpg timelapse.mpg

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous9:55 AM

    I bought TimeLapse the other day, and tried it out @ work this morning:

    http://flickr.com/photos/adam1975/3231135688/

    624 photos, 10 seconds apart for about 2 hours.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Adam,

    Thanks for the link - ive tried to view it but Flickr comes up with 'you dont have permission to view'...

    Andy

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous10:58 AM

    Oh yeah, sorry Andy! Try this one:

    http://users.on.net/~ajwood/stuff/Timelapse_001.avi

    FYI it's over 17Mb.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anonymous4:04 PM

    Intriguing - I've downloaded and will have a play.

    Looking forward to the promised extra info re the windows freeware...

    Cheers,
    Stuart

    ReplyDelete
  6. Anonymous4:52 PM

    There's a good note here on doing similar things with Nokia N series phones.

    ReplyDelete