10 years ago I created a couple of time-lapse videos showing the construction of the House, from different vantage points, and it seemed like a good idea to do the same for the Outbuildings – especially because the House provided a convenient place to mount a camera (which would also play a role long-term delivering security footage of the courtyard). I briefly considered doing something more advanced with a camera drone flying a pre-defined circuit on a regular basis, which could have provided a more complete 360-degree view, but that seemed more complex than I wanted to get into for a fairly conventional building.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One challenge was that the vantage point on the second floor of the House was too close to the Outbuildings for the focal length of camera I was using, so its field of view only captured the southern half of the Outbuildings – but that was still enough to give a good indication of the build progress. (There are some parts of the time-lapse when nothing seems to be changing – but that’s because work was happening out-of-shot.) I did a better job of choosing the angle of the camera on its mounting bracket than for the House, just<\/em> fitting in all of the roof.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The video creation procedure was the same as I used for the House: hourly snapshots grabbed from a UniFi video camera and saved as JPEG files (by a I’ve had the JPEG files sitting on a computer for ages and finally got around to deciding what range of dates to include – given that the last few weeks of the build were all happening either inside or to the north of the site, out of shot – and uploading the video to YouTube.<\/p>\n\n\n\ncron<\/code> job running on a Raspberry Pi) with some extra logic to exclude the night-time images (small files, because they’re nearly all black and compress to a small size) and then filtered to remove the weekends when no building work was happening. The separate JPEG files were then used to generate an MPEG video using the ffmpeg<\/code> utility. There’s more information about this procedure in the UniFi Video Camera Time-Lapse Video<\/a> page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n