Hi,
First post - let's dive straight in. My SO is a _("primary school")
teacher who wanted to do two things
(a) make a video of some of the plants growing in her classroom over a
few days, and
(b) make a video of her school garden to try and capture the foxes the
children think are digging up some plants.
Time lapse photography makes sense for both cases as several days of
plant growth can be compressed into 30seconds or so.
I hacked up a Cheese patch to support timelapse:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=581997
However, I don't think this patch achieves timelapse in a sane way. So
I've got a proposal as to how I think I should implement timelapse in a
more sane manner. However, the patch shows that Cheese can successfully
do timelapse.
First, timelapse would be a rarely used feature. So I think it should
be discoverable but not crowd the default Cheese window. I propose that
a user should choose timelapse from the drop-down menu
Cheese->Timelapse. Cheese->Timelapse would look similar to
Cheese->Recording but would not have a button similar to "Photo" or
"Video" on the default cheese window.
By choosing Cheese->Timelapse the user would put cheese into
WEBCAM_MODE_TIMELAPSE which would (I suggest) do the following
(a) create a tmp directory for timelapse photos, and
(b) add some widgets to the cheese window.
The timelapse photos would be stored in a tmp directory so that they
could be converted into a Theora video using the GStreamer MultiFileSrc
element. MultiFileSrc assumes that images are named with some
incremented integer eg: image-001.jpg, image-002.jpg ... This is not
the Cheese default method for naming. Thus it makes sense to create
them in a tmp folder. Furthermore, the user is interested in the output
video, not in the intermediate photos.
The new widgets added to the cheese window would allow the user to
specify parameters for the timelapse eg:
Take one picture every [5] [minutes] over the next [2] [days] and create
a [30] [second] video.
Where [5] is a spinbox for numbers.
[minutes] is a dropdown list of options [seconds, minutes, hours].
[2] is a spinbox for numbers.
[days] is a dropdown list of [minutes, hours, days, weeks].
[30] is a spinbox for numbers.
[second] is a dropdown list of options [second, hour].
The required parameters of frequency of photos and framerate of the
outputted video will be calculated automagically.
The end result of all this action is that the user has a timelapsed
video in their ~/Pictures/Webcam directory.
One obvious disadvantage of this approach is that it treats the stills
as intermediate data. So the user gets only the video output.
Furthermore, they have to choose a-priori the duration of the video.
Comments and criticisms please.
en_US.po:
msgid "primary school"
msgstring "elementary school"
--
Aidan Delaney
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