here it is (best seen in HD and full screen):

Time Lapse Miniature from flowolf on Vimeo. also on youtube.com

music by bob wizman – “on your 45″, licensed under cc-by-sa

the howto can be found here.

of course i wanted to make one

here is how:
get a nice point of view. somewhere where you could be if the whole scene would be a model scale 1:87 (H0 for model train lovers). use a tripod if possible or hold very still.
shoot the scene. i did this with my eos 7d and the HD video function. alternatively you could use any other cam which is able to shoot 2 pictures per second. some canon cams support this if you use CHDK.
having the material to work with load everything to the mac or linux box of your trust.

original frame and fake tilt shift

to make the time lapse i used ffmpeg to extract 2 frames per second from the .MOV:
$ ffmpeg -i ~/input.MOV -r 2 -f image2 out/scene_%06d.png
this leaves you 2 frames per second in .png files in the out folder.

faking it. next thing you need to do is getting the fake tilt shift effect in the images to make everything look like it was tiny. additionally i added a little contrast to make it even look better. if you do not extract the images from a HD movie file as i did you probably should resize them to a native HD size before the next step (1920×1080). here is the little script:

#!/bin/bash
# for better performance save the temp img that is created each time somewhere.
# this saves processing power
# convert out/scene_000001.png -sparse-color Barycentric '0,0 black \
# 0,%[fx:h-1] gray80' -solarize 50% -level 50%,0 \
# /tmp/my_blur_effect.png
# then use this:
# convert $filein -sigmoidal-contrast 9x30% \
# /tmp/my_blur_effect.png \
# -compose Blur -set option:compose:args 25 -composite \
# $fileout
test -z $1 && echo "usage: $0 " && exit -1
filein=$1
fileout=$2
\
convert $filein -sigmoidal-contrast 9x30% \
\( +clone -sparse-color Barycentric '0,0 black 0,%[fx:h-1] gray80' \
-solarize 50% -level 50%,0 \) \
-compose Blur -set option:compose:args 25 -composite \
$fileout

this has to be run in a little for loop. look here to see how this is done.
be very patient with this. this can take a looooong time.

after running this you have all you frames converted to have a higher contrast and a fake tilt shift blur, as seen in the lower picture on the side. all that you need to do now is run ffmpeg again and combine those frames to a movie:
ffmpeg -i final/%06d.png -sameq ./mymovie.mp4
-sameq tells ffmpeg to leave the quality of the images like it is. this guarantees a nice high quality, if your source material is ok.

if you like to add music to your clip you can tell ffmpeg to take an audio file as well:
ffmpeg -i final/%06d.png -sameq -i mysoundtrack.mp3 ./mymovie.mp4
to cut and fade the soundtrack i used sox:
sox -t mp3 -r 192k original_soundtrack.mp3 mysoundtrack.mp3 fade p 0 40 5
good luck!
and here is the resulting video:

i adapted them to have a shackle. this adds a lot of wearing pleasure and stability.

i took a wire to do the framing and some tape to fix the cable to it. then i coated the whole thing with sugru, apparently my new favorite working material.

the nook power supply supports 240V

as i blogged a few days ago, i got a nook (german). as this device only sells in the US it comes with a US power supply. lucky me that the supply supports 100-240 Volts out of the box. so the hack to adapt it to european power outlets was rather simple.

i found myself an old device which didn’t need the jack anymore. cut that off and had the perfect part to connect the original US plug to the cables within the new plug.

the soldering for this is easy as well. just connect the two cables. nothing can be done wrong here. except that the soldering might fall off again.

after that i just added sugru to the game. i put some inside and made sure the cables didn’t touch. then i pressed the parts together and formed this ‘belt’ around the neck of the jack. to cure this i fixed it with scotch tape and two corks.

after a few hours the hacked power supply was ready for use.

hack things better thanks sugru!

the final adapted nook power supply

one of them was Exif Viewer, until it stopped working with version 3.6.* of firefox.

since there was no update since July 2009 i didn’t expect a quick fix. so i did it myself.
here is what you do to make the addon work again (i already had it installed when i upgraded firefox to 3.6).

go to (the SOME_HEX_ID part is usually different for everone)

~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/[SOME_HEX_ID].default/extensions/exif_viewer@mozilla.doslash.org/

and edit the file install.rdf in that directory.
change:
[...]
em:minVersion="1.5"
em:maxVersion="3.5.*" /> <!-- Firefox -->
[...]

to
[...]
em:minVersion="1.5"
em:maxVersion="3.9.*" /> <!-- Firefox -->
[...]

or a version number that suits you. after a firefox restart the exif viewer addon should work again.

i give no guarantee this will work on any version of firefox. after all there is a reason they put a version number in there

the camera i used is my canon ixus 750. since the lense on this camera is rather low i had to improve the camera stand. i added some aluminum ducts to make it higher and to make the camera see the street. about 7 centimeters were enough.

since i was not able to get the CHDK timelapse to work i shot video. to generate a timelapse i used ffmpeg to extract images out of the video and to unite them to a timelapse video.
using this tutorial and the man pages i was able to come up with this:

#!/bin/bash
# sample usage: ./timelapsify.sh input.avi output.mp4
mkdir ffmpeg_temp
ffmpeg -i $1 -r 1.4 -f image2 ffmpeg_temp/%05d.png
ffmpeg -i ffmpeg_temp/%05d.png -sameq $2
rm -rf ./ffmpeg_temp

note that it is important for ffmpeg to have the images you use to generate the timelapse video in order and sequenced. if you decide to delete some images you have to rename them and must not leave gaps.
also you may have to vary the rate (i used: 1.4) acording to the speed of your input video and the speed of the output video you want to have.

one step i did between extracting and generating the timelapse was sending it through imagemagick to blend the speedometer. using info from this mailing list:

#!/bin/bash
#usage: pixelate_circle.sh IN.file OUT.file center_x_coord center_y_coord border_x_coord border_y_coord
convert $1 \( -clone 0 -scale 10% -scale 1000% \) \
\( -clone 0 -gamma 0 -fill white \
-draw "circle ${3},${4},${5},${6}"\
\) -composite $2

of course this has to be done for every image

and here is the resulting video:

i immediately ran into 4 problems. one of them that big that i decide to write these few lines to warn you about it (since they are essential to me).

the all so new finder is not really well implemented as it seems. finder has problems connecting to samba shares. a working setup under 10.5 (Leopard) was:

• a Linux Server with samba shares
• user password needed for personal shares
• some shares read only for guests as well.

one of the shares that is accessible through a password is my time-machine share. on this net share i run backups from my mbp. see how to do that in this blog post. time machine connected to it automatically.

for leopard i had to add this to the smb.conf to fix issues:

# fixes weird leopard behavior
unix extensions = no

but for snow leopard i had to add this:

encrypt passwords = Yes

because the finder will not connect to servers without password encryption.

this allone did not fix the problem that i could not login. connection to shares that are open for guest users did show, shares that needed login did not.

as it turns out the finder has a little hidden feature called “Numeric passwords ONLY”. this means that you have to have a user account that authenticates with a password that only consists of numbers! as soon as i changed that i was able to mount my beloved shares again and time machine seems to work as well.

some users report that finder is quite picky about dns resolution as well… see the forms i linked about that.

the second little issue i had affects boxee. the apple remote seems to handle locks diffently or not at all. whenever is started boxee under 10.5 the apple remote was talking to boxee only. under 10.6 it also controlls itunes and front row whilst i run boxee in the foreground. not so cool!

a third little thing that did not work in leopard either is tether a mac with the htc hero. this apparently works out of the box for linux users but not for mac. what’s so hard about that?

a fourth little thing that annoys me is that the new quicktime has no more option to stay in full screen when the focus comes off. this is especially disruptive on dual head setups.

i really really hope that apple will soon release 10.6.2 and fix these problems. i don’t get how they could have overlooked these…

here is the result: