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

Time lapse of Bethel University Commons.

Here is the link to the original post, which explains how the time lapse is made etc.

Watching Bethel

This video was made in the last hour, e.g., perfectly up-to-date as of this posting.

If anybody can think of a song that would go well with this that would be awesome. It would be even better is someone wanted to write one. Because I can't legally just attach any song to this...

(How ironic would it be if the song was Matchbox 20's How Far We've Come? [Lyrics | Video])




Here is the link to the original post, which explains how the time lapse is made etc.

If anybody is interested, higher quality videos are available (Blogger degrades the video quality so that it will actually stream more or less seamlessly,) as well as videos that play slower/faster. It might seem like its going really fast now, but by February of 2009 that is not as likely to be the case.