The Sulphur Mountain Gondola in Banff runs a great hi-def webcam. I've been syphoning images from it via a cron job every 5 minutes in order to make a time lapse movie. I'd originally intended on just doing a week or two. Then, I forgot about it, and the automated cron job continued quietly curling images onto my hard drive for 6 weeks. Just shy of 1GB of jpeg images.
It's really quite depressing just how much of the movie is dark. Black, depressing northern winter night. I left it in, just in case I do a summer timelapse for comparison.
I fed the images into QuickTime Player, and convinced it to compress it all down to 130MB of timelapse movie goodness. It's not full resolution - the original is 1280x720px, and compressing that down enough to not fill a fiber optic line resulted in such a crappily artifacted movie that it was unwatchable. I downsized to 768x576px while simultaneously screwing up the aspect ratio. Just pretend I used the magic Oprah slimming cameras :-)
[qt:http://www.darcynorman.net/video/BanffTimelapseH264_medium.mov http://www.darcynorman.net/files/images/200612281030.preview.jpg 500 281]
As an added bonus, there are two frames of fireworks on New Year's Eve. Now, let's put the Dreamhost bandwidth and disk space allotment to the test...
I might have to try making a DVD out of this. It'd be cool to have running in a loop in the background...