Time-lapse video of clouds over Boulder

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We tend to get a lot of sunny days here along Colorado's Front Range, but right now we're enjoying some much-needed rain. After a couple rainy days earlier this week, the clouds broke Friday morning and we got one clear day before the clouds and rain returned today. Anticipating a nice scene when the clouds broke, I set my Kodak Zi8 on a tripod in my window and let it run. I cut out a 15-minute piece of video using Avidemux and then used modified code found here and here to prepare the video. First, I extracted two frames from each second of video:

ffmpeg -i 2011-05-13-original.mkv -r 2 -f image2 png/%05d.png

I then made a text file with the names of all the images and used mencoder to make a 30fps video:

ls -1tr > files.txt

mencoder -nosound -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=5000 -mf w=1280:h=720:fps=24:type=png mf://@files.txt -o time.avi

I then went to Jamendo to get some Creative Commons-licensed music to use the in the background. I chose "Shooting Star" by David Palmero, one of the first albums I found, and used Audacity to cut out a selection to match the length of the video. Lastly, I used PiTiVi to merge the video and audio together, with fade-in and fade-out transitions, and then rendered the video in a format YouTube would accept. The result:

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