Q.Which way is up? A.You don’t want to be starting from here.
Having been flying around the country over the past couple of weeks, I’ve shot a lot of timelapse out of the front windscreen. Just because I can.
It’s largely thanks to CHDK and I have managed to record myself getting lost on routes between Sheffield, Lancaster, Leeds, Newcastle, Nottingham and York. I have a few plans for this media, but one journey is already online here:
This was quite a successful Flying Monkey TV experiment and I had it edited and online within three hours of getting home.
These journeys were mostly shot on a Canon PowerShot A560, timelapse-enable with CHDK, and mounted on the inside of the front windscreen with a suction mount (see below). I mounted the camera hanging from the top of the screen, upside down. This meant that it was in line with the passenger side roof pillar and hence did not obscure my view.
I don’t use the auto-rotate feature in most cameras because it sometimes gets confused and can give you a few incorrectly rotated frames here and there. Consequently, shooting this way, I end up with an upside-down video that then needs rotating.
I used to drop them into Final Cut Pro, render them and export them to a new movie file, which works fine, but I think it’s time to write a Bash script to do it.
No sooner said than done! Well, not quite, but it was much easier than I imagined. As usual Google managed to find some very helpful resources for me to cannibalise. Writing the code is much faster than documenting it into a usable blog post.
I started by reminding myself how to create a basic for-next procedure (detail included here for other noobs). Here is a bit of basic code with lists the files in the present working directory ending in “.JPG” (don’t forget this is case-sensitive) and echos them to the screen. The semicolons separate the statements and the “done” terminates it.
for i in $(ls *.JPG); do echo $i; done
For the next step, instead of just listing the file names to the screen, I added the ImageMagick step to rotate the image and write it over the original.
for i in $(ls *.JPG); do convert $i -rotate 180 $i; done
As you might have already gathered, I like some progress feedback so added an echo with the file count and file name.
for i in $(ls *.JPG); do convert $i -rotate 180 $i; x=$(($x+1)) ;echo “$i $x”; done
However, a current file number is only of use if you know how many more to go. A bit of googling revealed this forum thread and the code:
ls -l | wc -l
This lists all the files in the current directory and then pipelines that list to give an integer count of the items in that list. It’s not necessary if this is just a temporary folder and it’s cleared between uses, but if you want to filter the file types you can add a wild card search like this:
ls -l *.JPG | wc -l
I found information about the two commands on linux.about.com and a forum thread which combines the two on unix.com.
http://linux.about.com/od/commands/l/blcmdl1_ls.htm
http://linux.about.com/library/cmd/blcmdl1_wc.htm
http://www.unix.com/unix-dummies-questions-answers/36490-ls-command-listing-number-files.html
So my final piece of code (for this iteration at least) is here:
x=0; c=$(ls -l *.JPG | wc -l); for i in $(ls *.JPG); do convert $i -rotate 180 $i; x=$(($x+1)) ;echo “$x /$c $i”; done
This sets x to be 0, c to be the number of files with filenames ending in “.JPG” in the current directory, rotates each one of them by 180 degrees, overwrites the original file and echos the file number, the file count and the filename. It’s pretty basic and I’ll roll it into a script soon.
There may well be better ways of doing this, but it worked well as an exercise to reinforce my learning.
Flying Monkey TV 