ffmpeg

Frigate's 0.13.0 release included a feature near and dear to my heart: easy exporting of timelapses, straight from the Frigate UI.

I'm a little bit nutty about timelapses, and have made them with dashcams, GoPros, full DSLRs, webcams, and even Raspberry Pi.

But one thing I haven't done (until now) is make easy timelapses from IP cameras like the Annke 4K PoE cameras I use for security around my house.

Eventually I'm planning on automating things further, but for now, here's my process for building up a timelapse that's relatively small in file size, preserving only frames where there's motion from frame to frame.

For something like clouds/sky, or natural environments, it's better to do a straight timelapse export and maybe recompress it if you want, but for indoor or outdoor security footage, it's nice to condense it down.

I recently shot some footage with a GoPro, and realized after the fact the GoPro 'chapters' the footage around 4 GB, so I ended up with a number of 4 GB files, instead of one larger file. There are various reasons for this, but in the end, I really wanted one long file, so it would be easier to synchronize with footage from another camera and my audio recorder.

2023 Update: The following one-liner works a bit faster, and doesn't require creating all the intermediate files as the original method below did:

ffmpeg -f concat -safe 0 -i <(for f in *.MP4; do echo "file '$PWD/$f'"; done) -c copy output.mp4

This command assumes you're running the command within the same directory as all your GoPro .MP4 files, and there are no other .MP4 files in that directory.

So I found this answer on StackOverflow, which had exactly the commands I needed:

I recently took a family vacation from St. Louis, MO to Branson, MO, and as it was the first time driving with my new Mobius Action Cam Mini dashcam installed on our Toyota Sienna (see a full writeup and review here), I wanted to see if I could quickly whip up a time lapse video of the entire drive.

A tiny snippet of the final time-lapse video of my STL to Branson drive.