Recording a timelapse video of a sunset can be a fantastic way to capture the beauty of nature in a condensed form. Without a bulky professional camera, you can still record a timelapse video with Raspberry Pi easily. In this blog post, we’ll introduce the raspistill and ffmepg command for creating videos.

We can take a look at a demo video shot with pi-camera v1.3 on Raspberry Pi. It was a maganificant sunset in Minnesota.

First use raspistill to take a sequence of pictures during a period of time (e.g. 2 hours), then use ffmepg to convert the pictures to a video.

raspistill -n  -q 100 -ex night \
   -o pi_space/time_lapse_night/img_%05d.jpg -mm matrix -drc low \
   -t $((2*3600*1000)) -tl 3000

• -n do not display preview window (use this when you don’t have graphical interface to Raspberry Pi)
• -q set the image quality, range (0,100)
• -ex set the exposure mode. It’s the best to use night when the light is dim
• -o path to the output file
• -mm set metering mode, options: [average,spot,backlit,matrix]
• -drc set DRC(dynamic range control) to boost the image visibiltiy with different lighting condition. low for dim light
• -t set recording period (unit: ms)
• -tl set time lapse between two frames （unit: ms)

ffmpeg -framerate 30 -i time_lapse_night/img_%*.jpg -c:v libx264 -profile:v high -crf 20 -pix_fmt yuv420p time_lapse_night/a_output.mp4

Usually the -framerate ranges from 25 to 60. libx264 encoding generates video in mp4 format.