I set up a new V4 camera to hopefully capture the Northern Lights tonight. If the skies stay clear. Maybe I’ll even catch a couple of meteors. I haven’t set up my SkyCam in a couple of years. I have to set the night vision to off and disable the spotlight.
After the thunderstorm left the area, the sky cleared up nicely. I pulled the SD card and have scanned through a couple hundred 1 minute videos. I wish I was more familiar with video editing programs. I would love to stitch together a couple hours of this footage and then play it back at 4 or 5 times regular speed.
But, for now I will upload this 1 minute video. It is more dramatic if you scroll through it faster.
Here is a 9-second time lapse video of the best part of last night’s northern lights, taken by a V4 on my light-polluted Indiana driveway. It was filmed over a period of about 13 minutes:
Last night there was a threat of rain, so I had to put the camera and battery pack under a roof overhang. No such threat tonight, so I intend to move the camera out into the open.
I’ve set up a couple 4 hour time lapse recordings on a V4 pointed out a northside window and on the V4 SkyCam for tonight. Hopefully the skies will be a clear tonight as they were last night.
OUTSTANDING! The same thing happened to me in 2019 when I submitted a couple of meteor videos taken on a then new V3. The quality was so good, one of the morning show hosts exclaimed “That ain’t no iPhone!”
Working directly from the SD card is not recommended unless you have no choice.
The way I capture something like this is let the camera record to its SD card, and have it record a time lapse too. Then, using the Wyze app, you download the time lapse to the photo library on your device. You then watch the time lapse to find out where to go on the SD card to save a single frame, or a normal speed recording, to your photo library, also using the Wyze app.
If the sky is really active, then you just edit the time lapse to show the active period(s). I use iMovie for that.
To partially answer your question, a concatenator program will add together the 1-minute segments if you want to work directly from the SD card. Warning: The raw audio format the SD card uses isn’t compatible with all apps. Best to use the Wyze app to save what you need to the photo library as I outlined above. It will convert the audio into a more common format.
You can also drag the folder of raw 1-minute files to VLC, which will play them as a single movie at whatever speed you want.
Someone on here wrote a program to turn a normal recording into a time lapse, but I don’t notice that post at the moment.
Thanks for the advice. The raw footage that I have is from Friday night. But I neglected to set up a time lapse recording like I did Saturday and Sunday. BTW: Sunday was a complete non-show here in southern Wisconsin.
I will copy the files onto my laptop and try running them through VCL. Wish me luck.
Thanks for including this caveat. I found this out when I tried to concatenate several files using FFmpeg. Since the MP4 file format is essentially a container (as I understand it), I guess the combination of video and audio encodings that the Wyze cameras package into the files may not be an especially common pairing.