Log Tools

So, you want to create a time-lapse like all those big name celebrities? Afraid you don't have the equipment? Fear not! You don't have to have a desk that looks like this in order to make a time-lapse. I'm here to let you in on the secrets the celebrities don't want you to know!

• Turn off your screen saver and your screen sleep function. (Or, alternately, turn off your screencap tool when you sleep) 8 hours of black screenshots does no one any good.
• Put up your game or IRC or something when you're AFK for a while. It looks more interesting even if it's just IRC scrolling.

• Chronolapse is probably your best bet here. It is known to work on XP, and Windows 7 both 32 and 64 bit. Does Capture, Webcam Capture, Annotation, and video creation in one interface. Direct Link to Google Code Project here. Coded by an LD regular for LD.
• Pycatcher is another good option, coded by another Ludum Dare regular. You will need Python, PIL, PyGTK. Also OpenCV, and OpenCV Python Bindings are needed for webcam functionality.
• VH Screen Capture Driver + VirtualDub can be used too. This is more taking realtime video of your desktop, rather than taking screenshots and making a movie from them. It will tax your system much more than one of the other two solutions.

scrot & mencoder are the preferred choice for this.

• Basic: while true; do scrot & sleep 60; done
• Convert to JPEG while screen capturing (Takes less space, uses more processor): while true; do scrot -e 'convert $f -resize 50% $f.jpg; rm -f $f' & sleep 60; done

(If you have your own favorite mencoder line, please add it here)

• Basic mencoder:

  mencoder -nosound mf://*.jpg -mf w=800:h=371:type=jpg:fps=15 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=2160000:mbd=2:keyint=132:v4mv:vqmin=3:lumi_mask=0.07:dark_mask=0.2:mpeg_quant:scplx_mask=0.1:tcplx_mask=0.1:naq -o time_lapse-test.avi

• More

Here is a link. No promises on quality. http://www.mactricksandtips.com/2009/12/take-timed-lapsed-screen-shots-from-terminal.html

Youtube is best. No silly “no games” garbage like Vimeo (that despite the TOS covering games you create, they still don't care).