Making a Raspberrypi Stop Motion Video

This guide explains how to make a stop motion video using a raspberrypi with the camera module. As part of this exercise I also wanted to transfer the file over to another remote PC in an automated fashion.
The reason I wanted to do this was the using video made the filesize umanageable. With stop motion you can alter the interval, duration of process etc.

High level steps:

1. pi1 takes a picture every 10 seconds 
2. pi1 copies the picture to pi2
3. pi1 deletes the local copy and takes another picture and repeats the process.
4. On pi2 there is a scheduled cronjob that creates a video from the still images and then deletes the images files.

On pi1:

Create a folder to store our images:
mkdir /home/pi/camera

Create a script to capture the images:

sudo nano /home/pi/camera.sh

Add the following to the camera.sh shell script. The script itself runs through a for loop, you can see in this example it runs through 3600 iterations.  Within the loop the script takes a picture and outputs it to a file with a filename called picture-i (where i is the number where we are in the loop). The script then pauses for 10 seconds. This means that this script would take roughly 10 hours to work through the loop until it stops - you can obviously modify the values to suit your needs.  The script then writes the file to pi2 using scp - you need to have already setup ssh login without password for this to work. The script then deletes the local file and returns to the start of the loop. The deletion of the local file is purely to save space - it is not compulsory:

#!/bin/bash

#DATE=$(date +"%Y-%m-%d_%H%M%S")

for ((i=1; i<=3600; i++))

do

        DATE=$(date +"%Y-%m-%d_%H-%M-%S")

        echo "*** Taking Picture $i ***" 

        raspistill -o /home/pi/camera/picture-$i.jpg

        sleep 10

        echo "*** Writing file $i to remote server ***"

        scp /home/pi/camera/*.jpg pi@pi2:/home/pi/camera

        rm /home/pi/camera/*.jpg

done

Press CTRL + X, followed by Y to close the file and save it:

Make the script executable:

sudo chmod +x camera.sh

Now we move to pi2

Create a folder to store our images:
mkdir /home/pi/camera

Back on pi1 if we execute the script we should the .jpg files appearing in our folder on pi2.

cd /home/pi/camera

./camera.sh

We now need a method to create the video from the still images and delete the images to save space.

Create a script to make the video:
sudo nano /home/pi/make-video.sh

Add the following:

!/bin/bash

#DATE=$(date +"%Y-%m-%d_%H%M%S")

ffmpeg -framerate 25 -i /home/pi/camera/picture-%d.jpg /home/pi/Video-$(date +%d-%m-%Y-%H-%M).mp4

rm /home/pi/camera/*.jpg

Press CTRL + X, followed by Y to close the file and save it:

Make the script executable:

sudo chmod +x make-video.sh

Executing this script uses ffmpeg to create a video file at 25fps using the current date and time in the filename. It then removes all .jpg files from the folder.

Finally we create a cronjob to create the video periodically:

crontab -e

Add the following:

0 8 * * * sh /home/pi/camera/make-video.sh

This will run the script at 8am every day.

You can also create a cronjob on p1 to automate the other script.

crontab -e

Add the following:

15 8 * * * sh /home/pi/camera/camera.sh