Video Streaming and Time Lapse

I was recently tasked with providing a live web feed of a construction process on campus. The customer also wanted to have a time lapse video of the project after it was completed. My first reaction was no problem, people do this all the time. After asking several colleagues about what they do, I realized there is not much of a standard out there for this type of project.

Most of the people I spoke with recommended Axis Network cameras. I researched several of these but ran into one major stumbling block. The built-in web servers would only serve 20 people at one time. While this may be suitable for security purposes, it seemed that this feed, at times, would get more than 20 viewers. I could imagine that many people are like me, and would open the web page in a tab, and then just leave it running, eating up one of our connections. My customer, and I, thought it was unacceptable to have people turned away. Next we looked at using a free service through the web, and ended up choosing Ustream. We connected a consumer level mini-DV camera to an out of service computer and started streaming. You can see the results here:

Bates College Garcelon Field Construction Feed

For several weeks this has provided us a reliable streaming service. As an added bonus to our web people, it also provides metrics. Our customer has been very happy with the result, and we have heard from people who view the stream and they love it.

The time lapse portion of the project also required some research. Our intial thinking is that we would store all the video, stick it into Final Cut Pro, and speed it up. We quickly learned that even though this is a short construction project (5 months) saving all that video would take too much space. We also did not think we had the processing power to create the final video.

We did some research on various cameras, but learned that most of them that did time lapse saved it as a QT video. We did not want to work with video that a Point and Shoot camera had compressed. Finally, we learned that Canon cameras come with a piece of software that manages the camera and activates the shutter on a schedule defined by the user. This software is only available on the higher end Canons. We purchased a Rebel XS, on sale for $500. If you go this route, you will also want to purchase a power supply for the camera. I forgot this step and had to scramble to get one when I realized the camera was not powered by USB from the computer. We have done a few tests of the time lapse, again with great results. Look back here in October and I will post a link to the final time lapse, along with a final critique of how this project went.