I have been looking for a similar project since.

Then, a little over a year ago, I got a request from Cousin Peter in Australia for a different sort of time-lapse film. Peter wanted to see the result of 1 shot at the same time each day from the Farm Cam, rather than a single day compressed into one video. A long term project, which I accepted.

Based on Peter’s request, I created a new action in EvoCam that would snap a photo at noon each day. That action would also collect all of those images together until I was ready to export them. And then I waited. [If you are interested in the details on how this on-going video project works, check the tutorial.]

Today I am ready to share the video, and I am pleased with the results. The final video is made up of 355 images, ten short of a year’s worth. This is due to power outages, or computer failures.

Note: All videos on this page contain music.

Noon All Year

Bonus Material

If you’re still here and want more, I also made videos of sunrise and sunset for one year, and set them to music as well. The clips that make up these time-lapses are shot at sunrise and sunset — set by my location — each day, collected in a file, and now I have exported them as short films.

A Year of Sunrises

A Year of Sunsets

Interview with Gage Hill Crafts

Check out my interview with Gage Hill Crafts on this project…

If all goes as planned (stop laughing!), this will be enough to help keep EvoCam running between restarts.  If not? Then the next step is increase the frequency of the reboots until I can set up the Mac Mini, and start all over on that machine.

Because, I am all out of options as far as out-of-the-box software after giving SecuritySpy a close look this weekend. The results, as always, were mixed.

Let me start off by saying SecuritySpy is a very sweet piece of software. It especially has great documentation and a responsive developer and forum community. Designed for monitoring property, it has many features that are appealing such as motion detection, a remote streaming service, and even an iOS app. However, when I tried to recreate all the actions I use for this website, I wasn’t able to accomplish everything.

I didn’t start off planning to give SecuritySpy (another) trial when I downloaded it on Saturday. I am doing some research for another camera-related project, and saw that the Ben Software product was listed as the only known Mac software that worked with the device I was investigating. The last thing I want is another project that I spend too much time fixing!

The pluses were that I was easily able to add my Hikvision camera, and that it was intuitive to have it upload a still image every 30 seconds. The minuses were that while it can save stills locally it doesn’t have a built-in method for stitching them together, and saving them as a video. Meaning that it can’t do time-lapse.  It does have the ability to change the playback rate of any continuous video it captures, which simulates time-lapse, but the resulting files are humongous by comparison to the current file sizes.

The other drawbacks SecuritySpy posed for me when it comes to recreating the FarmCam, is the scheduling feature. SecuritySpy doesn’t appear to have a way to schedule starting and stopping processes based on light sensors or location services to determine sunrise or sunset. Not to mention the inability to use any font I want as the overlay for the timestamp.

In other words, instead of dealing with a few crashes, I would have to write Automator applications with multiple steps and run cronjobs again.

I am very intrigued at the future use of SecuritySpy for my possible next project, but for now the search continues for macOS software that can do all the things EvoCam can.