I was at Myrtle Beach for just a few hours yesterday and was taking photos of the sunrise on my phone. I was thinking to myself that I wished I had some sort of device for stabilizing the phone so that I could take time lapse photos (set the camera to take one photo every x seconds) and convert it to a video. I then decided to attempt to do it by hand, bracing the camera against the top of a trashcan and setting it to take one photo every second. I couldn’t make it absolutely stable and couldn’t take long sequences (because of fatigue) but managed to take decent shots of around 3 minutes each. (If I had planned ahead, I would have liked to bring something to hold the phone and photographed the scene for 10 or 15 minutes.)
Video of both segments together can be viewed here (click on download link.)
Now for the Android questions:
1.) The Gallery app in Android allows you to string up to 50 images together into an animated gif, but I’d like to be able to string an arbitrary number together into a video (and ideally resize/crop/etc them.) Stuff I can (and did) do on my PC, but would like the option of doing it on-phone. Anyone know of a video creation app that can do that?
2.) When I started to string the photos together on the PC, I noticed that the photos weren’t the same size–x and y dimensions differed by as much as 50 pixels or so from frame to frame (one might be 2550x1930, the next might be 2560x1925, the next might be 2540x1920, etc.) Any idea why the camera wouldn’t be consistent with a fixed image size from one shot to the next?
(To fix this problem on the PC, I had to pick a size from in the range (2560x1920) and resize all of the images to match it, then run it through an image-stabilization filter to correct for the slightly larger/smaller scenes caused by the resizing–some of the remaining shaking in my video is from my unstable hands but some of it is from correcting for the resized photos.)
No experience with this myself, but the term to look for is “time lapse” when looking for apps.
I can’t find anything on the size of the image changing–I would suspect it was specific to your phone, and not an Android thing. What model is it?
Finally, any reason you didn’t upload to YouTube, Streamable, or some other sharing site? I think you might get more people watching if they didn’t have to download an AVI.
It doesn’t have to be time lapse, it is simply the concept of stringing frames together to make a video. In VirtualDub, my go-to program on the PC, all I have to do at the “open video” dialogue is pick the first photo in a sequentially numbered series and it will automatically open them all as a video. I’d like something that simple for Android.
Didn’t want to put it on the YouTube account I have, didn’t know any other “one-off” anonymous services I could post it to (imgur doesn’t support video), didn’t think clicking the download link on a 16 MB video clip was an onerous proposition.
I wonder if the photos are slightly different sizes because of some effect or post-processing you have selected. For example, I think image stabilization (digital, not optical) could cause small but varying amounts of “trimming” of the edges. That’s just a way-out-there guess, though.
In regards to using a download site instead of YouTube… maybe other folks don’t mind that but I don’t want anything to do with those free download hosting places. Who knows what sort of “Free!! Babylon Search ToolBar” crap they’ll try to trick me into downloading? Stick to YouTube, otherwise not many people are going to watch your clip.
Installed this. Not a bad app, but it is limited–on my newer phone it can capture at only 1920x1080 and on my older phone only 1280x720. With the method I was using before frames captured in 4x3 in the full resolution of the sensor, giving you more material to play around with. I did make a discovery while playing around with it, though–I lay the newer phone down on a flat surface outside to capture footage of a cloud directly overhead and the resulting video had the same juttering slight zoom in/out caused by different frame sizes as the earlier video, meaning that the differences weren’t caused by image stabilization. I did a test video with the older phone and the problem didn’t occur, so it is a bug specific to the one phone.