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Timelapse toolkit for the Exploratorium

I’ve been doing some development work at the Exploratorium, and my latest project is now ready to go live. It is a general purpose, highly configurable timelapse recording program, that will soon be incorporated into an interesting experiment in social dynamics (I’ll tell you what it is when it goes live).

Exploratorium timelapse toolkit

The program is developed in Max/MSP, and contains a lot of useful features:

  • Live preview of camera input
  • Timestamping of recorded frames can be turned on or off
  • Can be controlled with a rotary encoder (big free spinning knob) allowing users to “travel backwards in time”
  • Timed recording, you can have it start and stop recording a timelapse movie at specific times
  • User configurable recording interval and/or difference threshold (ie. record a frame when something changes)
  • Disk based buffering of the current recording, so you can scroll back and forth while it is recording
  • Program saves all settings automatically, making it possible to run unattended and on a schedule

The system is designed to be sufficiently flexible and configurable that it can be deployed in multiple situations where timelapse recording is interesting.

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