Sutro fog

Well I sure know what I would do if I had a kick ass view of Sutro, make a bunch of timelapse videos of it. Thats what Jonathan did.

Check out this stunner. Kinda makes me feel like I’m soaring towards the Ivory Castle on Falkor, my trusty luck dragon:

The instructions for making your own are simple, just fire up that Linux machine you have lying around and dig through heaps of ffmpeg forums:

I used gphoto2 running on an Ubuntu machine to grab photos, basically as quickly as I could get them off the camera (roughly one every 5 seconds). I’m getting them at fairly large resolution (2048 x 1536), though I crop and downsample them for the video. To create a 20fps video from the still photos, I use ffmpeg, which is amazingly powerful provided you get the command line options right.

He adds:

So as the unrepentant perfectionist, I still see some areas of improvement. Despite a fairly decent camera mount, I still see more camera motion than I would like: I am going to try bolting the camera directly to the building, but I suspect the building itself moves.

God damn plate tectonics. Maybe he could bolt the camera to Sutro?

[via rotormind]

5 Responses to “Sutro fog”

  1. suckerpunch says:

    Camera shake aside, pretty bad ass and mesmerizing. Very cool, and thanks for sharing!

  2. Dr. Fart says:

    Sutro fog on my ding-a-ling

  3. sonofsoma says:

    An ‘oh-so-cute’ Sutro Tower steals the show during the final scene of “The Unseen Sea” (Simon Christian, 2010)

    Unseen Sea is both an artistic and technical masterpiece of HD Time Lapse, and reamins still the gold standard.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4-zUlEAQpM

  4. Rudy says:

    That’s real time, right? Doesn’t look like time lapse from what I’ve seen!

  5. MrEricSir says:

    If you’re too lazy to write a shell script, there’s a program for Gnome that can do all this for you called gTimelapse.