Quite some time ago I had an idea to capture 24 hours of one of my favorite webcams in Rocky Mountain National Park. Over the Thanksgiving holiday, I experimented with some different ways of doing this. After a number of tests, this is the method that had the best results. This was done on a Mac using standard OS X software.
I used the Automator App that ships as a standard part of OSX to capture the images from the RMNP webcam and then save them to my hardrive. I'm sure there are other (more geeky) ways to accomplish this, but this seemed to be the easiest (aka no programming required) way to get it done.
The webcam I chose updates every 10 minutes, so I captured an image every 10 minutes starting at 6:30 a.m.
I did have to download a free utility for the looping, since the built-in loop action wouldn't let me wait 10 minutes between screenshots.
Here are the steps:
Create a new "custom worflow" in Automator.
Next add Internet -> Get Specified Urls and put the URL of your webcam image in (and remove the Apple.com url). In my case, I used http://www.nps.gov/webcams-romo/glacier_basin.jpg. If you can't get the actual filename, you might need to take a screenshot rather than download the url. See below for some caveats.
Now, add Internet -> Download URLs and choose the "other" option. Choose a folder to store the images.
Next, I added Files & Folders -> Rename Finder items. An alert will pop up asking if you want to make a copy of the oringinal files. I chose not to. I changed the "format" to Hour Minute Second.
Now, save it as a workflow.
To set up the loop, download the free "Automator Loop Utility" from http://automator.us/downloads.html#1014
Place the Automator Loop Utility applet on your desktop and drag the workflow icon onto the applet icon and set the loop time (in seconds). The result is that you should have an app that you can run which will hit a webcam image url and save it to a folder over and over.
The first time I tried this, I set up the workflow to take a screenshot of the web browser using Utilities -> Take Screenshot. If you go this route, you'll need to turn off any screen savers and ical/email alerts. Half of my screenshots had an alert reminding me to take the trash out. The other problem is that you'll have to edit out the system and browser toolbars.
I also discovered that when you're taking the screenshots, it's a good idea not to let your computer go to sleep, not let the display go to sleep, and not have a screensaver enabled. Also, if you go the URL download image route, the process will work in the background and you can do other tasks, while with the screenshot route, you prety much need to leave it run by itself.
Once you have all the images saved, open up iMovie and create a new project. I chose 1080p HD movie. Drag all your images into the clips pane and then drag them in chronological order to the clip viewer (under the preview window). By default, iMovie sets the duration of each image to 5 seconds, which I thought was too long.
It's really easy to change the duration, just hightlight all the clips in the clip viewer, right click and choose the "edit photo settings" option then click the "Show Photo Settings" button. I set mine to 1 second duration and removed the Ken burns effect.
Save the project and export it as a Full Quality Quicktime movie (or whatever format you want it in) and you're done!
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