Preface

Puzzling is one of my habits, and someday I saw a video on YouTube about time-lapse the star-trails. I was amazed by the beauty of the time-lapse video, And I think I can do it with my puzzle too. So I started to set up my gears.

Take One Action!

Gears

  • Camera: IPhone 6 or IPhone 12 Pro
    • I take a test run on both my old IPhone 6 and my new IPhone 12 Pro. The isolation had huge difference when the video file size was similar. So the IPhone 12 Pro is my choice.
  • Software: PowerDirector
    • I had used PowerDirector before, and I think it is a good choice for me to start with, and most important is that it had free trial.

Taking Action

  • Every day I took a video of me doing puzzle for 1 hour, then transfer the video to my computer everyday, otherwise the IPhone storage will be full.
  • Use PowerDirector to speed up the video to 10x by day.
  • Merge all the video to one video file, then adjust the speed to make video length to desired length.

Result

Problems

  • The video looks great, but notice that the video is not so smooth, there are shakes every few seconds. That’s because I have to re-setup the camera every day, and the camera was not in the same position every day.
  • And the free trial of PowerDirector is over, now there will be a watermark on the video, I have to find another way to do the time-lapse.

Take Two

Gears

  • Camera: Redmi Note 8
    • To solve the problem of re-setup the camera, I choose to use a spare phone to take video.
  • Software: FFmpeg
    • I think there is gonna be a engineering way to do such the easy video editing.
    • Free and open source.

Taking Action

  • Because the new mobile holder had some angle issue, I can only using the front camera to take video.
  • To avoid the re-setup issue, I use app to transfer file to PC with wifi. the app is not so stable to transfer big file after a small test, so I change strategy to take photos.
  • Use FFmpeg to merge all the photos to one video file, then adjust the speed to make video length to desired length.

Result

Take Three

Gears

  • Camera: Redmi Note 8
    • After I moved, I bought a new mobile holder, and I can use the back camera to take video.
  • Software: FFmpeg

HOTFIX

  • The video got problem of moirĂ© pattern, change the camera frequency to 50Hz did not solve the problem.
  • Back to the way of taking photos.

Taking Action

  • New effect elements: fade out and zoom in.

Result

Conclusion

  • The video looks great, and I think I can do more with FFmpeg.
  • The process of making video, let me learn knowledge of video and some trivial knowledge such like movie standard frame rate is 24fps.
  • Issues are faced when I try to do something new, and I have to learn why and how to solve it, this is the part of the fun.
  • I will leave the trouble shooting to the next article, and I will share my experience of using FFmpeg to make videos.
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