Weathercam timelapse January 1, 2023
Channel: hunt1803
Date: 2023-01-02

Happy New Year!  The clouds put on a very cool show for us today, starting off the year right!  First thing in the morning they undulate, shimmer, and flicker with shafts of sunlight, then pause for a moment.  Seems as if they are uncertain which direction to head, eventually devolving into a battle of cloud fronts. A very interesting sky, worth the watch, all the way through!

Timelapse created using an inexpensive USB Webcam pointing out at the world from inside our home towards the North/Northeast. Connected to an older laptop running OBS Studio and ffmpeg freeware to record and process the video.  

To get the timelapse effect I researched how to set parameters in OBS Studio to record at 1/6th of a frame per second. This captures a frame of video every 6 seconds. Unless the recording is modified, that frame will also take up 6 seconds of the playback from the raw recording, sort of like a slide show.  

To make this into a usable timelapse, I have to remove that extra length of each frame. So I processed the video using ffmpeg, another open source tool, to shorten those frames and get the video to have the timelapse effect.

I've added some overlays to the OBS Studio recording. One to indicate day and time, and the other to display a portion of my home weather station data.