Monday, February 22, 2021

Tomatoes On Film - The Screentest

I'm a bit under the weather, so I'll just share a time-lapse video I made yesterday of our tomato bed.  I used my new Raspberry Pi to control an inexpensive USB camera. The images were stored on the Pi and later transferred to my desktop where I used Adobe Premiere to stitch them into this video.

My first photos revealed a flaw in my plan. Time of day matters. I had planned to take shots early in the morning for my eventual tomato growth video, but the sun was low on the horizon and visible to the lens so the photos were completely blown out. 

I made this video to find the optimal time to film the bed each day. Once I settle on a time, I'll have to correct it for time of year so that the sun's angle on the bed remains relatively constant as the weeks go by. That's not a difficult problem, but it's more than I can blargh today.

The video covers a 3-hour period with images captured every 2 minutes. In Premiere, I used the video transition effect to provide a small amount of blending between frames. Enjoy.

4 comments:

tim eisele said...

I like the effect of the dog stopping to check things out, the shots of looking both ways almost looked posed.

That tree off to the right looks a bit like a dinosaur, waving its little forelegs periodically.

K T Cat said...

I loved that cameo appearance by Leah, aka America's Sweetheart, too. In accordance with the Dog Actor's Guild contract and previous arrangements with her agent, we had to pay her several treats for it.

Ohioan@Heart said...

I didn’t see the mandatory disclaimer that there were no animals harmed in the production of your film. ;-)

K T Cat said...

Har har bark.

In a further development, we now have tested taking photos using a cron job and it worked. The cron job for the real time-lapse project has been created and every day at 1400, the camera will photograph the bed. Yay!