A Rant About Something Stupid...then a video

This post is mainly to make note of how to mange time-lapse moving making with a Raspberry Pi and Magix Edit Pro...Mainly. Here is the video, and I know it is crude, but I think that adds to its charm.

Soooo...in years past I have noticed that at the first of spring in most years the bamboo in our back yard can grow at an astounding rate! Thinking about it this year I remembered the Raspberry Pi I played with a year or two ago but put aside because it kind of got hacked.BUT, this time I decided to be less cavalier about permission and worked through installing an OS, webcam software for my really old webcam, and for fun installed a web server (Apache) and a wiki (Dokuwiki current hosted on said RaspberryPi sitting in the second bedroom with  a USB cable snaked out the back window to the old usb webcam).

With the help of the Internet I quickly setup the webcam software and started a linux job to take a picture every 30 minutes for the duration of this project.

Then after I had to reinstall everything because I used too small of an SD Card...I was set and you can see the video above.

Unfortunately this year seems to be a particularly UN-spectacular growth-wise. So it mainly became a project for time-lapse digital photography.

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Now for my curmudgeonly take on video editing...I appreciate Adobe premiere but God damn it you have to by a monthly subscription?!? Sorry that is bullshit.

Yeah I know it is good, and in the late 2000’s I used a then old version and was pleased with it. But I  got a slightly old version for free from a sales rep who had one laying around,  and to buy it would have been may hundreds of dollars, it is was cool and I got to use it for a fee years. And now I see you can only get it with monthly subscriptions? I repeat myself..that’s Bullshit!

Anyway after using my Adobe Premier version 6.5 for a few years I discovered my version couldn’t handle HD video, and since I couldn’t actually afford Adobe Premiere, I bought Magix Edit Pro Plus for around $40 and have been using it ever since. Amazon now has it at $70 and compared to Adobe it is well worth it. I suppose if you made professional video there might be reason to use Adobe, but maybe not. I guess this is partially a gripe about following the software herd. Of course sometime there is reason to go where everybody else is going, but if you happen to be a grumpy contrarian you might look elsewhere. Not that corporate Magix could be as bad as corporate Adobe.

Another anyway..this is how you import a bunch of still pictures into Magix Movie Edit Pro and make a time lapse movie.

First, get a bunch of images

then import them all into Magix Movie Edit Pro

go to Effects

Video Effects

Speed

for this I settled on .07 second frame time

Movie Editing Tips : Part 1

For quite a few years Ive been using Magix Movie Edit MX which I think is now call ...Pro. Anyway, when I first starting my amateur video making  10 years yeas ago I was fortunately gifted a fully functioning Adobe premiere package from a software salesment. But when I switched to HD the version was too primitive to handle it.

I probably could have found a cracked newer version of Premier but ended up purchasing a Magix Movie Edit MX from Amazon. For my purposes it is as good if not better than the Adobe thing.

Anyway, I don't use it all that often so this it to remind myself how to do a few tasks. Rather than pay a ton of money to have my in-laws box of 8mm films transferred to digital I found if you have a variable speed 8mm/Super8 projector you can speed it up enough so the flicker disappears whne you simply record to a digital camera recording the projections.

The upshot is you can't get a perfect screen projection ration to recording area AND the motion is too fast.

Here is what you have to do to remedy that.


To change frame to compensate for recording from projection on wall.

effects
video object effects
Motion effects
Section (NOT Size and Position)

To compensate for having to remove 8mm projection flicker by increasing projector
film speed by 10 to 15 %


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effects
video object effects
Motion effects
Speed
Factor
move slider to left to slow down speed to it roughtly matches orginal
factor of .84  so...