Video to Timelapse
As part of our media project, Artshiftr, we've captured a variety of nature timelapse videos from around the world. On a trip to Switzerland we found ourselves missing the essential "shutter release cable" necessary for our motion-slider to speak to our camera so we opted to capture a long video and process it with Touchdesigner instead.
The Problem
We had the camera mounted on a two axis slider which moves the position of the camera slightly periodically over a long period of time. When recorded as a video, the movement between positions causes a jitter in the shot. Here's what the shot looks like when sped up by 150x:
Here's a look at the classic approach to speeding up a video in Touchdesigner which we used to create the timelapse above. This approaches preserves all the frames of the input video but speeds it up by 150x and saves the result.
The Solution
In this post we'll share the Touchdesigner network we built to process the footage to eliminate the jitter issue, and explain how you can download and use this project to buffer frames from your long video and put it back together into a timelapse. Here's the video resulting from this process:
This project allows you to load a video, then specify the interval and offset to pluck frames from it and repackage them back together as a timelapse. It uses a cache Top to store the frames in memory then offers a slider to preview and adjust the final playback speed to taste.
To use this, download Touchdesigner 2023.12 and our free Vid2Timelapse TD project off our Artshiftr Gumroad. From here you can do the following to process your video into a timelapse:
1. Select your video in the "File" slot of the MovieFileIn Top. Weaker machines might require a frame sequence for the input instead. If you are using a frame-sequence just put the path of the folder into the File input.
2. Adjust the 'frameRate_const' to match your video's recording frame-rate settings and for the 'inverval_const' put the step interval you want to use for your timelapse.
3. Hit the "Load Images" button to load the images into the cache with your settings. It may take a moment to load the images depending on how long the video is and what your frame interval is.
4. Use the 'Speed' slider to fine tune the speed of your timelapse, a setting of .5 is the default, turning the speed all the way up will be 3x the default speed.
5. Hit the 'Save Video' button to save the video to your computer.
We couldn't find an existing solution anywhere on the internet so felt like it might be worth sharing. If you find yourself with a similar issue, feel free to download the project and try it out for yourself!
