Below are time-lapse movies of the weather shot from our balcony in Neuchatel Switzerland. The camera faces south to the Alps .
November 2010 to Mid-April 2011, most movies were one day in length. Due to increasing length of the day, movies made after 18 April, 2011 may cover 2 or 3 days, this allows me to leave the camera running, which is easier on my schedule.
Current weather in Neuchatel, older: August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011
February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010
Archives How it is done Winter boat schedule
How it was done: I used a SONY HDC-1000E video camera mounted on a tripod. Each day the following occurred:
- The camera is set to record 1 frame (still at 1078x800) per minute to a 4 GB chip.
- In the evening, I shut off the camera and remove the chip, plug it into the PC, delete the 500+ shots from the previous night, and move all the remaining files to a network drive.
- I reset the chip and camera for the next day.
- Using Sony VEGAS 10, open a project set to 640x480, square pixels format.
- I import the stills as a clip then put the clip in the editor. I set the properties -> playback rate to 0.25, as slow as it can go.
- I then render this to a local hard disk as an AVI.
- Using Flix Standard, I open the AVI and encode it to a SWF file using VP6-E preset for CBR streaming at 872 kbs.
- The daily HTML is copied from the day before and lightly edited and saved as new by date.
- The main weather page index is the same file, lightly edited.
- I upload the the SWF, 1 new and 1 edited HTML file to the website.
All this takes about 20 minutes per night, it has become a ritual after dinner. If you have questions use the contact link above.
Cheers, John
Moved to HTML5: In March 2017, I transcoded all the SWF files to MP4 using HANDBREAK in batch mode. If you see a video which doesn't work, please send me a note at the contact link above.
Boats leave the port at 06:30, 12:10, 18:10(Mon-Fri), 09:30(Sat Sun), 14:10(Sun),
roundtrip is 80 min. From April 1, a boat arrives at 16:00, departs at 16:15 on weekends.
