Watching Bethel

This was rendered yesterday and slightly different from the rest, it goes at a slower speed. As I write I am working on what I hope are the final steps towards filtering out all of the night and weekend shots. I know I am making some progress at any rate.

Previous time lapses can be found here, the first post on the subject here. Links provided mostly because this post is aimed at a certain high level person at Bethel whom I hope is able to find some use of this.

As long as I am at that, I have to thank Dr. KT for pressing me to show this to others at Bethel, I know that at least one high level person found it very helpful.

I don't think I ever told the story of how I started this project and it is kind of funny. Basically, a little over a year ago, I was sitting in a classroom. Slightly better than the dungeons of the HC (a nasty set of classrooms at BU), but no windows and right next to the building you can see above. I could feel the tremblings of the bulldozers.

I knew that last time BU had setup a major building project (the new dorms) they had set up a webcam. I even know someone that found the IP address of the webcam and found that s/he could pan/zoom it via their browser, but I digress.

Wanting a "window" to the outside I searched for the new Commons project on Bethel's website and indeed found the webcam. At first I just watched it in class (meaning, for the first day or something like that.) I quickly realized that it would make a pretty cool time lapse. Where "pretty cool" means that I would get a kick out of it. I like doing time lapses and have set up a couple on my own for, well, fun.

That really was the whole point and genesis of this project -- it was fun and I could do it. Usefulness was never really considered (hence the thanks to Dr. KT). By today I am just short of collecting 400 days worth of photos. I grab them both hourly in one set and by the minute in another set. The set shown has always been the former. The latter is the one I am working on to "perfect."

Guess we'll see how that goes in the coming days. It takes a little bit of time to render these (viz., putting all the relevant pictures into a video) especially on a computer that is at least 8 years old.

Watching Bethel: Getting Close

It's getting more fun to watch the time lapse -- especially as I have posted one in over two months! It is getting really close to completion. I am still planning out perfecting my algorithm that picks out what pictures to use and what ones to throw away. I'll do it as soon as I have time. Work is sucking up a lot of that.

Anyway, enjoy. This was rendered fresh this morning!

Watching Bethel

I haven't posted a time lapse for awhile so I thought I would. This was rendered yesterday.

Watching Bethel: A Little More In-Depth

When I started this project I found that there was a pretty was way to differentiate between night and day (pictures), which is important so there isn't five seconds of blackness between each day. Done correctly, it even adds a nice fade in and fade out between days.

The way I did this was by looking at the number of different colors in a given picture. If it was under 4,000 it was nighttime. For sure. Until December 14th. On that day the construction workers started leaving a light on that pushed the number of colors up close to 10,000. Day shots generally have 45,000-60,000 different colors (yes, in one picture). However, upping my "border" value between day and night to 10,000 pretty eliminated any fades, and still included the night shots with the light on.

Hence, a different method has to be chosen. I have two choices, so far as I can tell. First, determine the average lightness of a picture to decide if it ought to be included in the time lapse. Second, figure out when the construction hours are, only include those pictures and write my own script for fades. The former is much easier.

For a visual idea of what "lightness" looks like in a photo I have posted an Excel graph below. The scale on lightness of is out of 255 for technical reasons so I put a couple of percentages in to make it easier to read. Essentially, during the day the lightness is always between 55% and 63%. A lightness of zero is complete blackness, and a lightness of 100% would be pure white, so finding that the average lightness is somewhere in the middle isn't a big surprise.

The vertical axis is the lightness value of a picture (one grabbed every minute) and the horizontal axis is what minute of the say it is. A day has 1,400 minutes, so 7,200 is high noon. You can see how the day widens and narrows from the fall through the spring, although I should note that the values from October and May in the graph are not complete. Hence, I expect that the May curve would widen out a bit. Finally, the horizontal axis doesn't start at 0 or end at 1,400. They are just straight lines before and past those points respectively, so I cut them out.



P.S. I may move back to madjon.net soon. Maybe, designing a website isn't easy... But I'm also not a huge fan of Blogger anymore.

Watching Bethel

It's been a bit since I put up a time lapse so here is one from later today. I am also working on a better script to render it, to get rid of those nasty night pictures from where they left a light on.

I also need to start writing down some of the blog posts the keep popping into my head (really, pretty much completely written) but never make here. Maybe I'll more than two regular visitors that way...

Watching Bethel

The latest, does not include today.

Watching Bethel

Latest time lapse of the new BU Commons, rendered this morning.

Watching Bethel

As promised here is the most recent time lapse of the construction of the new BU commons. (Created today, before dawn)