Over the years I have had requests to share the details of how I do the technical things that power the FarmCam. Below are instructions for using EvoCam to share still images as well as timelapse videos on a website to which you have FTP access.

Unfortunately, EvoCam is no longer being developed so everything in this article will likely focus on Version 5.0 (64-bit preview 3) of the software. At the time of this writing one can still download the software from reputable sites; however, if you cannot find it, email me. I can provide the DMG file, but I do not provide support for the software!  EvoCam works only on macOS, and I have tested it  up to: macOS Sonoma Version 14.3.1 and current run it on my Apple Silicon (M3) iMac (2023).

There is an EvoCam User’s Guide, which can be accessed under the software’s Help menu. Please read it, especially if you have no experience with the software.  I will not be covering connecting cameras, adjusting image sizes, exposure, etc. Again, I cannot act as support, which is why I am going into such detail in the article.

This article assumes the reader has a webcam that is either physically connected to the machine that will run EvoCam or a networked camera supported by the software. I use a networked ANNKE C500 – 5MP Outdoor PoE Security IP Camera which is mounted on a post on my front porch, and is wired using a PoE Injector.

File Transfer Protocol (FTP)

In order to upload your images and timelapse videos you need to enter your FTP credentials into EvoCam. This article assumes you know what FTP is, and how you connect to your web host using it.

1. Click on EvoCam in the software’s menu and then select Preferences from the drop down.
2. Click on FTP Server from the top menu, and then enter your FTP Server information. If the FTP fails at at any point during the resulting tests, you will need to check with your web host to get the correct setting. Sorry.
3. Enter your username, password, and the initial path — if it is different than the root set in the FTP Server path. I use the temporary file setting, but it may not be necessary unless you are uploading images in rapid succession. If the FTP fails, and you know your path and credentials are correct, try checking this box.

Start with Still Images

In order to create a timelapse you need to take still images at different intervals.  This could be every 60 seconds, every hour, once a day, or almost any other period. EvoCam will create the timelapse from these still images, and the length of your video will be determined by how many images are saved.

1. Open EvoCam, and select New from the File menu.  As soon as you open a new file, click on the File menu again, and choose Save As… Navigate to the directory of your choice, and give the project a name. When you start for the first time, EvoCam may actually find your camera and display the image. In my case, doing this step enabled my Mac’s built-in camera and I was staring at myself [that’s me in the screenshots in this article].

Click on the Actions button. For the sake of this tutorial we will be working exclusively in the Actions and will not discuss live streaming or recording video. During the time periods. If you are doing a 24-hour camera then you can leave the “During these time periods” as Always. Play around with the other options if you only want to perform tasks during a range of time or even based on detected levels of light. I recently switched to detected light levels so that my camera catches sunrise and sunsets and doesn’t abruptly stop. When any of these conditions occur. In the next section you decide when this action occurs.  For this tutorial we will first need to create a collection of still images so that the time lapse can be created. Select “Every x seconds/minutes/hours” in the top Periodic conditions section. Change the default to however many seconds you want between new images. Hold off on checking the box next to the entry for now. Perform these actions. In my case I use the actions in this process to both “Add image to timelapse archive” and “Upload named image to the server.” It doesn’t matter which order you create these two actions. Once you select them from the drop down menu, change the settings as follows:

For “Add image to timelapse archive” you can check the box and forget it, but I suggest clicking on Desktop and navigating to a directory of your choice, or a new one entirely. There is no need to change the file Name from “Timelapse”, but you can. For “Upload named image to server” you can again check the box and keep the default file name or type your own. Engage! If you are happy with the settings then you can check the box next to your conditions setting from Step 4 above, which will start the process of taking a picture, saving a local copy to use as a timelapse, and upload a still image to your web server.

Time to Timelapse

This is the trickiest part of the process because it isn’t intuitive. Choose Options from the EvoCam menu and then select Show Multiple Action Sets. This displays a new option at the top of your Actions screen named Set, and the default is now Actions 1.

1. Rename the still image action from above. Click the bisected circle with the down caret, and choose Rename Selected Set and change the name to something like Still Image.
2. Create new Set for Timelapse. Now choose the drop menu circle again and select Add New Set. When prompted type Timelapse and click OK.

The resulting screen change should look familiar as a new Action. The process will be similar to that of getting the still image, but I’ll spell it out below.

1. During these time periods. Again, if you are doing a 24-hour camera then you can leave the During these time periods set to Always or change the time periods to something that works for your project. For this article, I am describing my process, and I have it set to Always.
2. When any of these conditions occur. In the case of the Timelapse Action Set, this is where you instruct EvoCam on when to stitch all of the still images it has been collecting and to turn it into a movie. In my case, I have chosen the Everyday at specific time option from the conditions drop-down menu and set it to Every dat at 11:59:59 PM.

Perform these actions. For the Timelapse Set there is only one action to perform, Export timelapse archive as movie, but with some confusing settings. After choosing Export timelapse archive as movie, check the box to enable the action, and then:

• Select all images, removing them from archive from the Export drop-down menu. NOTE: It is likely that I could save myself some headaches by changing this setting, but honestly I haven’t bothered.  I address archiving via a Shortcut process, and it is only necessary if you want to keep ALL of your time lapses which will take up disk space.
• For the Archive Folder click on the default folder and navigate to the location you chose in section 5, subsection 1 in the still image process above. Make sure the Archive name is the same as the one in the still image process as well.
• For the Movie folder, click on the default folder, and navigate to the location of your choice. For the Movie name, type a name (without space, ideally).

Advanced Actions.

• Upload movie to server. Check the box next to Upload movie to server. This will upload your timelapse as an MP4 to the same directory you set in the FTP Server settings previously.
• Delete movie file after uploading. If you have no need for the original, local file, then you can choose Delete movie file after uploading. However, below I address archiving options (using Shortcuts and cron), so if you would like to eventually auto archive, leave the box UNchecked.
• Playback rate. The default setting is 30fps, which seems to be standard for online video. The problem is that the faster the frame rate the quicker your movie will go. You can play around with this setting find your sweet spot. You can also adjust how often a still image is taken if you want even more control over the look and feel of the final product.

Unless I have forgotten something, that’s really all there is to this whole thing. Read on if you want to learn about the basic code for your site so you can show off you work.

HTML For Your Site

There are a great many good sources for learning HTML, and I have to assume the reader has some basic HTML skills, and so I am only giving the most basic of mark-up in this section.

Still Image
In order to display the still image you uploaded to your website, use this code and replace YOURWEBSITE.COM with your own domain, and PATH with the initial directory set in EvoCam’s FTP Server preferences. If you changed the name of the image as well then make  sure you use that JPG name.

<img src=”http://YOURWEBSITE.COM/PATH/mycam.jpg” />

Timelapse Movie
Again, this is the most basic of ways to display your video. Again be sure to change everything in ALL CAPS with your own information, and change MP4 name if you changed that.

<video src=”http://YOURWEBSITE.COM/PATH/timelapse.mp4″ type=”video/mp4″></video>

Shortcuts for Moving Files

For my process I need to move files around in order to upload them to YouTube and archive previous timelapses. The first process is to move the daily movie from where it is saved locally to my local Dropbox directory.

The Shortcut at right finds the daily movie .mp4 file (I have blurred out the path), gets the name and the creation date for the file, renames the file by appending the creation date to the beginning of the file’s name, and moves the file to a directory within the DropBox folder (named video in my case).

I use crontab to run the Shortcut at 5 mins after midnight each day. That looks something like this:

5 * * * * shortcuts run 'MoveToDropbox'

Note that the Shortcut name in the image is the name found in the cron job.

Once the file is in the Dropbox folder a Zapier applet (they call them zaps) sniffs that folder for new content and then follows my instructions to upload the file to the linked YouTube account. This image at right is a snap shot of that applet.

Once the file has been upload to YouTube the next Shortcut can be run to move the file from the Dropbox directory to a local archive directory. This isn’t necessary but as I use a free Dropbox account with space limits this second process saves me storage space.

Using crontab again, the next Shortcut runs shortly after the last one, leaving enough time for the process to run. In my case the crontab looks something like this:

30 * * * * shortcuts run 'DropboxToArchive'

The Shortcut is a simple 2 line script that finds the contents of the Dropbox directory, and moves the file back to a local directory, in my case named “archive.”

That’s about all there is to it. The Zapier applet is a little complicated to share here, but if one needs to know the details, contact me.

Despite lots of tests I was unable to get a consistent time-lapse after the switch. The streaming on YouTube worked fine, but EvoCam just didn’t seem to like the new camera. Time-lapses were choppy at best often displaying the same image for much, if not the entire, video. The timestamp overlay would change, but not the image.

Over the course of about a month I tried changing various settings in the Amcrest configuration. First trying a smaller image size — no way 4k was going to work — and then changing the bit rates. Nothing worked. Then I tried moving OBS software running the live stream from the ancient Mac Mini to my iMac, leaving only EvoCam on the Mini. No change.

I am admitting defeat on this, and have returned to the Hikvision camera. I am glad I heeded the advice of my wife and left the Hikvision in place, so the swap was a simple reconnection of the Ethernet cable and changing a few things on EvoCam and OBS.

The hope is that I can still use the Amcrest camera in a future project (Sheep Barn Cam anyone?), but for now we are back to where we were a few months ago, but at least everything is working. *knock wood*

A few days ago we had our first crash since the modifications I made were put in place, and I am realising that the likely issue is a software bug in EvoCam which is causing a kernel panic. For not the first time I recently looked at the iMac and EvoCam had crashed, and the computer had locked up. Hard rebooting results in seeing a computer shut down due to an error message each time. I’m not a computer surgeon, but that doesn’t seem right.

That makes my next step to get down to the minimum number of open applications running and see if the issue continues. That will be EvoCam and Airmail. The latter because I use it to filter spam to reduce the spam I see on my other devices.

After that, my options appear to be to automate a restart of the computer and see if that helps. The crashes aren’t so frequent that a weekly restart would likely do the trick. Or I could try running EvoCam on my (currently) unused Mac Mini, and allow it to run as the webcam’ dedicated computer.

For now, we do our best to take care of EvoCam.

Every time I make a change to EvoCam or to the Hikvision settings, something new occurs. Not necessarily good or bad, just new. And times like this I am simply baffled.

Again, it’s time to look under the hood.

I thought I had turned off the so-called night vision — there is no setting called night vision for my camera, but we’ll get to that — when I made adjustments to the white balance. I had assumed that when I adjusted the white balance from default (AWB1) to Nature Light, that the darker screen meant the feature was disabled. I also assumed that making this change made the green screens go away. It may have, but it could be other things. I recently did a fresh macOS install and I have made many changes to the EvoCam settings since I last had a green screen occur. Can’t assume anything at this point.

When I consolidated the tabs, I noticed that the night vision (just easier to say that, at this point in this narrative) returned; and no changes to the camera settings were made. I scratched by head, but it was time for bed. As long as there weren’t any green screen errors, I would be fine with this freaky change at least until I had time to sleep and think.

In the morning, I checked the footage for the 24-hour timelapse, and was please that not a single frame was green.  Win, I thought. Then I checked the daylight-only timelapse, and saw the problem.

With the night vision back on, there was enough light that EvoCam’s light sensor thought it was daylight. Therefore I had two identical timelapses, and would continue to have two unless something was done.

I played around with the Hikvision interface, and noticed it was the WDR options under Backlight Settings creating the night vision effect. I did a quick video search for my camera model and WDR and learned a bit more about the setting. I decided to leave it on and check the results for the daytime images the next day.

But not before creating a test Action in EvoCam to see if I could still recreate the daylight-only timelapse without the light sensor or disabling WDR.

There is an Action setting for “every day when it is daytime (or nighttime)” which uses location services in macOS to determine sunrise and sunset at the location. This means that the resulting timelapse will start exactly at sunrise and end exactly at sunset. However, unlike the conditions option in use for the sunset and sunrise images, there is no way to offset that time. Not ideal, but it appears to be my best option. I know at least one person — possibly my only viewer — who says she likes the daylight option. And I have plans for the daylight videos to be stitched together. So as of today this method will replace the old light sensor version of the daylight movie.

My opinion so far is that WDR handles shadows in a superior way to when it is turned off; especially around the barn and tree line. The colors appear a bit brighter to me, as well. Ergo, for now, more changes, tweaks, and experimenting… the way I like it.

If it ain’t broke, it ain’t fun, right?

Sigh.

I am not too busy at work, so I quickly go through all the usual steps to try and figure out why I can’t see the camera image in EvoCam. Including:

• Connect to the camera via it’s maker’s software. 
• Connect to the camera via the web interface. 
• Restarted EvoCam, the router, and the iMac. 

While logged into the AirPort Extreme via Airport Utility, I noticed that there weren’t many devices connected to it. This likely meant that it was a hardware or power issue. Since I could connect to the iMac via VPN that ruled out power.

Because of the snow storm, we were sent home to work remotely. But when I got home, I still did things the hard way. I looked at the switch and it looked to be working. Lights flashing on the appropriate ports. The PoE Injector was dangling a bit from the AC outlet, but the lights were on and it looked to be functioning.

So then I turned to cables. And naturaly I did this the wrong way as well. I started by unplugging the cable from the PoE to the switch. I changing the port. Then I decided to grab a new Ethernet cable. I was going to bypass the switch and go right to the router. I plugged the cable into the PoE and as I approached the router, I had a flash…

This morning, you moved the router to tuck the telephone line and power cable behind it. Did you…?

I reached behind the AirPort Extreme and pressed on the cable that leads to the switch.

Click.

Sigh.

That was it. I got in my own way (again) and created a problem for myself. This time because 2 small black cords were distracting to me. And then I kicked myself some more when I realized I didn’t even think of the most simple of checks by failing to turn on the AppleTV to see if it could connect.

Now the silver linings.

While I had been futzing with EvoCam from work in the morning, I noticed that the time-lapse movie was huge in file size. When I was home, I took a peek and noticed that I had 2 different processes writing to the same file name. This led to the movie being a combination of the last 3 days worth of video. I think I sorted that out, and I may not have noticed had I not screwed something else up!

Also, by doing all that hard work a few weeks ago organizing cables, and bypassing my wireless kluge, I freed up an old Airport Express. It sat on my desk for a few weeks, not unnoticed, as I discovered the grey of the Apple logo is the color I want to paint the upstairs bedroom/library/office/exercise room. The reason having the device was handy is that I was able to use it to plug the VoIP telephone from work in and be able to have it near the iMac which I use to screen share to the office so I can work from home. Much better than last time, when the phone was downstairs plugged into the AirPort Extreme and I had to put people on hold and run upstairs to look things up or troubleshoot.

So, I got that going for me.

I like to pretend that what I am creating with the FarmCam Project is like software development; each tweak or improvement a new version. Sometimes it feels that way as I wrestle with EvoCam to get the most out of the abandoned software, that has gone dark without explanation. I can’t just make a support request or post to a support forum. If there are diehard EvoCam enthusiasts, I have no idea where to find them.

These instructional entries are here for two reasons. One, I hope to help others who may have similar interests — or needs — to my own. Secondly, if I don’t write this stuff down somewhere, I am likely to break something and forget WTF I did. These are my own manuals in some sense. Hence, many entries with lots of guess work and promises to report back later. Most of the time I forget to do some things in advance, and I am left wondering if a change will make any difference at all. Other times, I’m not patient enough to test things before I write about them here. [This is another of those times!]

Tab-less With Benefits

Today I am going to discuss using fewer tabs in EvoCam, and stream-lining one session while naming EvoCam Actions to help organise the tasks. This task is not exclusively to make things pretty, but an effort to prevent EvoCam from crashing.

I assume that the idea behind EvoCam’s tab feature is to allow one to use the software to manage multiple video feeds. For the last year or so, I have been using them to manage other project tasks, but always from the same video feed. My theory is that doing so was using more system resources, and possibly causing the software to crash more frequently.

If you read this site, you may recall that I recently took great joy in wiping my 6-year-old iMac’s hard drive and doing a fresh install of macOS.  One of the reasons I did this was to try and isolate the FarmCam project, and reduce the number of other applications vying for system resources. There is very little else running on the iMac other than the necessary applications to power the project.  EvoCam to grab the images, save them, and upload them to the website, and very little else. I also took advantage of the clean install to organise the directory structure for the FarmCam project. Previously I had everything saved in a sub-directory of a sub directory of the Movies directory that comes with macOS … and I mean everything.

So recently when I noticed EvoCam crashing more frequently, with most other applications running fine, I looked for what I could do to reduce the resources being used by EvoCam.  Since it’s a clean install with so few things running there’s a chance it is a memory leak or something out of my control too. But I wanted to see if I could come up with an answer. I can’t give up on EvoCam. At least not until I can find something that can do all the things I need it to do, and I have been looking for over a year now.

Moment

Yesterday, while I was writing about my truck problems — still in the shop, thanks for asking — I was also clicking back and forth between the EvoCam tabs for each part of the project.

Each time I chose a tab, I typed ⌘K to view the settings for that tab, and the tab size would grow based on the window size of the previous tab. Being a bit of a neat freak when it comes to my desktops meant that I would then have to re-size EvoCam when I was done. This is my issue, and I own it, but my issue led me to a possible solution to the crashing challenge.

I had started these tabs as ways to try out new things, and then it just became a hassle to unwind the knot I had created.  I assume software developers have similar challenges — on a greater scale of complexity, natch.

One tab was named oncedaily, and it ran the Daily Sunrise, Daily Noon, and Daily Sunset features. The next one was named dailymovie and it ran the Daylight Timelapse process. The third, which was actually the original, was titled FarmCamNew, and it controlled the still image that is displayed every 30 seconds as well as the 24-hour Daily Timelapse.

Each of these tabs was displaying the exact same video feed from the exact same camera!

My solution was to take screen grabs of the settings for all of the EvoCam Actions across all three tabs. Then I recreated each Action from the extraneous tabs, and added them to the FarmCamNew session. After they were transferred, I renamed each Action and grouped them in the Set drop-down [see image] so they are easily discernible. When I was done, I closed the oncedaily and dailymovie tabs, running everything as FarmCamNew.

I typed ⌘S to save, and now I wait.

I said above that I often don’t plan these tests very well until they are in process or done completely. In this experiment, I neglected to check the Activity Monitor before I made all my changes and binned the old tabs. I had looked at the Activity Monitor last week, and I think I recall seeing constant %CPU readings in the mid-30s at least for EvoCam. I was surprised that EvoCam — and VTDecoderXPCService — were the 2 biggest CPU hogs.

However, as I typed this entry, I have closely watched the Activity Monitor, and EvoCam has averaged about 7.5% and VTDecoderXPCService at around 15%. EvoCam also appears to only use around 3% (or less) when it is in Hide and Leave Active mode. Every 30 seconds — time between still images for the FarmCam — the CPU usage goes up a few percentage points, which is understandable, but nothing that seems excessive.

I hope I am right about this, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say my first desire was for something that looked better on my desktop. Not crashing so often would be a huge bonus.

So I returned to Automator and created a three-step workflow to take the two movies created daily, rename them with their creation date as part of the file name, and then move those to another local directory.

Now I don’t know about you, but I am not a *nix guru.  Not even close.  But I can search, read, and follow directions. Plus, I am not trying to schedule something challenging. In this case, all I need to do is run my Automator application each day at five minutes after midnight. With a few keystrokes I was in Terminal.app and had my schedule:

5 0 * * * /Applications/FarmCamArchive.app

That translates to running my three-step Automator application every day at 12:05am (crontab.guru is a great cron deciphering tool). Plug in your own variables and it will instantly translate it to English.

All was well until I reformatted the iMac’s drive and did a fresh install of macOS. Suddenly my cron wasn’t working. I could run the Automator application, but it wasn’t running on its own anymore. I ran a few tests on the iMac with little success, and then decided to try a free graphical app I had called CronniX. This is a great app if you are a n00b to all this, and just need to automate a few things. I found my solution through a checkbox in the CronniX settings to “prepend /usr/bin/open”. YMMV.

Now I am inspired to try a few other scheduled tasks. The next one is a monthly archiving of the daily movies that are on my local drive. So I wrote an Automator workflow to take a month’s worth of timelapses (x2!), compress them to a ZIP, rename them with their creation date, and move the originals to the system trash.  The schedule for that job is:

10 0 1 * * /Applications/MonthlyArchive.app

The Automator was a little more confusing to get right, but that’s another story.

Anyway, it was great fun learning a new thing, and finding a free tool to make things a little bit easier for novice like me.

What to CronniX next?

* sorry, I couldn’t help myself with the title. I was going for the straight-up weed references, but this is kinda a twofer.

Over the years I have had requests to share the details of how I do the technical things that power the FarmCam. Below are instructions for using EvoCam to share still images as well as timelapse videos on a website to which you have FTP access.

Unfortunately, EvoCam is no longer being developed so everything in this article will likely focus on Version 5.0 (64-bit preview 3) of the software. At the time of this writing one can still download the software from reputable sites; however, if you cannot find it, email me. I can provide the DMG file, but I do not provide support for the software!  EvoCam works only on macOS, and I have tested it  up to: macOS High Sierra Version 10.13.6 on my Mac Mini (Mid-2011).

There is an EvoCam User’s Guide, which can be accessed under the software’s Help menu. Please read it, especially if you have no experience with the software.  I will not be covering connecting cameras, adjusting image sizes, exposure, etc. Again, I cannot act as support, which is why I am going into such detail in the article.

This article assumes the reader has a webcam that is either physically connected to the machine that will run EvoCam or a networked camera supported by the software. I use a networked HikVision DS-2CD2042WD-I which is mounted on a post on my front porch, and is wired using a PoE Injector.

File Transfer Protocol (FTP)

In order to upload your images and timelapse videos you need to enter your FTP credentials into EvoCam. This article assumes you know what FTP is, and how you connect to your web host using it.

1. Click on EvoCam in the software’s menu and then select Preferences from the drop down.
2. Click on FTP Server from the top menu, and then enter your FTP Server information. If the FTP fails at at any point during the resulting tests, you will need to check with your web host to get the correct setting. Sorry.
3. Enter your username, password, and the initial path — if it is different than the root set in the FTP Server path. I use the temporary file setting, but it may not be necessary unless you are uploading images in rapid succession. If the FTP fails, and you know your path and credentials are correct, try checking this box.

Start with Still Images

In order to create a timelapse you need to take still images at different intervals.  This could be every 60 seconds, every hour, once a day, or almost any other period. EvoCam will create the timelapse from these still images, and the length of your video will be determined by how many images are saved.

1. Open EvoCam, and select New from the File menu.  As soon as you open a new file, click on the File menu again, and choose Save As… Navigate to the directory of your choice, and give the project a name. When you start for the first time, EvoCam may actually find your camera and display the image. In my case, doing this step enabled my iMac’s built-in iSight camera and I was staring at myself [that’s me in the screenshots in this article].

Click on the Actions button. For the sake of this tutorial we will be working exclusively in the Actions and will not discuss live streaming or recording video.During the time periods. If you are doing a 24-hour camera then you can leave the “During these time periods” as Always. Play around with the other options if you only want to perform tasks during arange of time or even based on detected levels of light. When any of these conditions occur. In the next section you decide when this action occurs.  For this tutorial we will first need to create a collection of still images so that the time lapse can be created. Select “Every x seconds/minutes/hours” in the top Periodic conditions section. Change the default to however many seconds you want between new images. Hold off on checking the box next to the entry for now. Perform these actions. In my case I use the actions in this process to both “Add image to timelapse archive” and “Upload named image to the server.” It doesn’t matter which order you create these two actions. Once you select them from the drop down menu, change the settings as follows:

For “Add image to timelapse archive” you can check the box and forget it, but I suggest clicking on Desktop and navigating to a directory of your choice, or a new one entirely. There is no need to change the file Name from “Timelapse”, but you can. For “Upload named image to server” you can again check the box and keep the default file name or type your own. Engage! If you are happy with the settings then you can check the box next to your conditions setting from Step 4 above, which will start the process of taking a picture, saving a local copy to use as a timelapse, and upload a still image to your web server.

Time to Timelapse

This is the trickiest part of the process because it isn’t intuitive. Choose Options from the EvoCam menu and then select Show Multiple Action Sets. This displays a new option at the top of your Actions screen named Set, and the default is now Actions 1.

1. Rename the still image action from above. Click the bisected circle with the down caret, and choose Rename Selected Set and change the name to something like Still Image.
2. Create new Set for Timelapse. Now choose the drop menu circle again and select Add New Set. When prompted type Timelapse and click OK.

The resulting screen change should look familiar as a new Action. The process will be similar to that of getting the still image, but I’ll spelling it out below.

1. During these time periods. Again, if you are doing a 24-hour camera then you can leave the During these time periods set to Always or change the time periods to something that works for your project. For this article, I am describing my process, and I have it set to Always.
2. When any of these conditions occur. In the case of the Timelapse Action Set, this is where you instruct EvoCam on when to stitch all of the still images it has been collecting and to turn it into a movie. In my case, I have chosen the Everyday at specific time option from the conditions drop-down menu and set it to Every dat at 11:59:59 PM.

Perform these actions. For the Timelapse Set there is only one action to perform, Export timelapse achieve as movie, but with some confusing settings. After choosing Export timelapse archive as movie, check the box to enable the action, and then:

• Select all images, removing them from archive from the Export drop-down menu. NOTE: It is likely that I could save myself some headaches by changing this setting, but honestly I haven’t bothered.  I address archiving via a 3-step Automator process, and it is only necessary if you want to keep ALL of your time lapses which will take up disk space.
• For the Archive Folder click on the default folder and navigate to the location you chose in section 5, subsection 1 in the still image process above. Make sure the Archive name is the same as the one in the still image process as well.
• For the Movie folder, click on the default folder, and navigate to the location of your choice. For the Movie name, type a name (without space, ideally).

Advanced Actions.

• Upload movie to server. Check the box next to Upload movie to server. This will upload your timelapse as an MP4 to the same directory you set in the FTP Server settings previously.
• Delete movie file after uploading. If you have no need for the original, local file, then you can choose Delete movie file after uploading. However, below I address archiving options (using Automator and cron), so if you would like to eventually auto archive, leave the box UNchecked.
• Playback rate. The default setting is 30fps, which seems to be standard for online video. The problem is that the faster the frame rate the quicker your movie will go. You can play around with this setting find your sweet spot. You can also adjust how often a still image is taken if you want even more control over the look and feel of the final product.

Unless I have forgotten something, that’s really all there is to this whole thing. Read on if you want to learn about the basic code for your site so you can show off you work.

HTML For Your Site

There are a great many good sources for learning HTML, and I have to assume the reader has some basic HTML skills, and so I am only giving the most basic of mark-up in this section.

Still Image
In order to display the still image you uploaded to your website, use this code and replace YOURWEBSITE.COM with your own domain, and PATH with the initial directory set in EvoCam’s FTP Server preferences. If you changed the name of the image as well then make  sure you use that JPG name.

<img src=”http://YOURWEBSITE.COM/PATH/mycam.jpg” />

Timelapse Movie
Again, this is the most basic of ways to display your video. Again be sure to change everything in ALL CAPS with your own information, and change MP4 name if you changed that.

<video src=”http://YOURWEBSITE.COM/PATH/timelapse.mp4″ type=”video/mp4″></video>