Generating a time-lapse video

Having a camera attached to a computer provides us with a great way to take pictures at controlled intervals and automatically process them into a video to create a time-lapse sequence. The pycamera Python module has a special capture_continuous() function that will create a series of images. For the time-lapse video, we will specify the time between each image and the total number of images that need to be taken. To help the user, we will also calculate the overall duration of the video to provide an indication of how long it will take.

We shall add to our previous GUI interface to provide controls to run time lapses and also automatically generate a video clip from the results. The GUI will now look similar to the following screenshot:

The time-lapse application

Getting ready

You will need everything set up as it was for the previous example, including the cameraGUI.py file that we created in the same directory and pycamera, which we installed. We shall also...