Automatic Generation of Time-lapse Animations

A simple system for the automatic generation of time-lapse animations has been created at the Aerodynamics Laboratory of the Institute for Aerospace Research, National Research Council of Canada (NRC). The system consists of two small Perl programs and a static web page, and relies heavily on two open source software packages: LWP::Simple, and ImageMagick. The first program, tlget.pl, runs for several hours each weekday and is responsible for the periodic acquisition (and storage) of images from a webbased camera. The second program, tlmpeg.pl, is responsible for the conversion of groups of JPEG format images into MPEG format animations. Typically, tlmpeg.pl is executed each weekday night, and generates three animation files, one from the past day’s images, one from the past week’s images, and one from the past month’s images. A static web page has been created to display the image most recently acquired by tlget.pl, and to provide links to each of the three animation files most recently generated by tlmpeg.pl.