Time lapse for Burning Man

So the time lapse camera that Christoph and I made for Burning Man in 2003 has been reborn and will be even better. I did a test run of it over the past weekend and am glad I did. As you can see, it got knocked from its perch and lost a bit of focus...so it is not as good as it could be. Oh yeah, and Clark yanked the cables from it so it didn't last the entire trip. However...it will be great once for the playa...

<geek>For those of you following along on the geek side, here are the bits and bytes:

• Camera is an Axis 2100 webcam. Actually a bad ass little webcam with linux running. So, cron job sent to ftp an image. In the example above, it was once every 10 seconds, however, I am going to crank it up to once a second.
• Old, old Sony Vaio laptop from our company Three Deep running Windows 2000. Was going put linux on it, but don't have the time!
• War FTP running on the laptop. Simple, lightweight and fast as hell!
• Western Digital Passport drive. This is the most troublesome, as I don't completely trust portable usb drives. However, it was laying around and I need the space!
• Mencoder for the video and audio encoding.  Mencoder ROCKS...once you get the hang of it.  BTW...using mplayer is awesome as well.  Being able to build and test from the command line saves so much time.  As well, you can adjust fps from the command line to really QA the final build.  Here is the command line I have settled on right now:
• mencoder -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=msmpeg4v2:vbitrate=1600:mbd=2:keyint=100:vqblur=1.0:cmp=2:subcmp=2:dia=2:mv0:last_pred=3 -mf type=jpg:fps=10 -o batch2.avi mf://*.jpg -audiofile soundtrack.mp3 -oac copy
• I will be cranking up the fps when I crank up how many pictures are taken.  I will be testing it at 1 picture a second for ftp, 30 frames a second for playback.  Hoping that this gives a fairly fluid playback while holding onto the time lapse format.
• A scheduled job moves the jpg's over to the drive and kicks off the daily build.  Current.TV will be on the playa and has expressed interest in the video...so I will probably build it every day and have it for them on a USB thumb drive.  BTW...The output is much better than the flv that youtube has posted.

</geek>

Oh yeah, and here is what it looks like with some of the photobooth shots...get ready for a full version with music...