Regina had a great idea: She set up an app on her phone to make a timelapse video of almost the entire drive from Anchorage to Seattle. We set up the phone on the inside of the windshield, hanging from our dashcam. The app took a photo every 5 seconds. That ended up taking a huge amount of storage space: 35,563 photos used up about 90 gigs of storage. We had to unload the files from the phone a few times to make space. She used the Open Camera app for Android, and it did a pretty good job.
We had to manually start the camera whenever we started driving, and stop it when we took breaks. We forgot sometimes, meaning this isn’t a perfect timelapse. But I think we got 99%+ of the drive.
Once we got home I played with various methods to stitch all the photos into a video. I played with Adobe Premiere but found it mostly frustrating. I ended up using the open source tool FFmpeg. It took some trial and error, but once I understood the various options, it made it quite simple to turn the images into videos of different lengths.
A video at 60 frames per second with 35,563 photos ends up being (35,563/60) 592 second long, or about ten minutes. I think this one is my favorite, because it shows every single image we took:
But ten minutes is kind of a long time, so I also rendered the video out into a 5 minute version and a 3 minute version. They of course take less time to watch, but everything goes by so fast, it’s kind of jarring!
And, finally, I made one that’s a more leisurely watch: By reducing the framerate to 30 frames per second, the 35,000 images take about twenty minutes to go by. It’s easier to see what’s going on in this one, even if it’s pretty long:
Timelapse of drive from Anchorage to Seattle, 20 minutes duration
When I was stitching the photos into a video, I recognized so many fun places I remembered from the drive: Towns, geographical features, and other attractions. I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if I could label the video with the current location? I found a piece of software that would take GPS coordinates and output a place name. I figured I could do that for each photo, and then overlay the place name on the video. The effect should be that as the timelapse progresses, the name of the current place is displayed. However, when I went to look at the metadata of the photos, I realized it didn’t store the location data. Whoops! So I won’t be able to do that. But next time I make a timelapse, I’ll know to turn on GPS location data. I guess it’s time to start planning the next roadtrip…