First of all thanks for the positive comments! Special thanks to The Field Lab's John Wells for providing the camera, scenery and animation.
The TFL netcam is set to upload a new image to www.thefieldlab.org every 10 seconds.
About the IP network camera...
http://thefieldlab.blogspot.com/search?q="IP+Cam"
Sometimes when the TFL connection is busy the netcam can't upload every 10 seconds and the time between updates gets extended.
Regardless of what the netcam uploads to the webpage. My computer in the UK grabs an image off the website every 18 seconds currently, which seems to be a good compromise at the moment. That amounts to about 2200 images a day. The program I use to grab the image is wget for windows. This is a command line utility driven by a windows script. The script is started every day at a defined time by a windows scheduled task and is set to run for about 13 hours.
About wget...
http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/
Downloads...
http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/wget.htm
The program I use to compile into a movie is Photolapse...http://home.hccnet.nl/s.vd.palen/index.html
I save the photolapse avi as an Uncompressed avi. The reason for this? I use Windows Movie Maker (free with WinXP) to add the sound track and save as a "High quality video (large)" wmv file.Since I am processing it twice, I chose Uncompressed for the first pass to avoid loss in picture quality at this stage. Just beware, this uncompressed avi seems to have a built in size limit of just over 2GB. If it is bigger it just wont play. So I have balanced my file numbers to dial in just the right number of frames to come under this limit. I set it to 24 frames per second to create an uncompressed avi, then I use Windows Movie Maker to add a music mp3 and save as a wmv file. This 12-13 MB file is then uploaded to Youtube. If you would like more info on the windows script that drives wget.
The script is here...
http://www.m0jos.com/getpic.txt
I have it saved to wget's working directory...
"C:\Program Files\GnuWin32\bin"
as getpic.wsf
and a windows scheduled task that runs...
"C:\Program Files\GnuWin32\bin\getpic.wsf"
adjust the line in the script that reads...
WScript.Sleep(19000); //milliseocnd interval
to set the save interval.
