Timelapse for Construction

Is there a way to utilize the v4 camera or any other Wyze camera for a construction timelapse? We are looking to document a football field project, this could possibly take 2-3 months. Possibly a picture taken every 30-60 min 7 days a week. This would be stored inside a pressbox with AC power available.

Welcome to the Forum, @btesnow! :wave:

The short answer is ā€œyesā€; however, Iā€™m not sure if youā€™ll be able to capture everything you want with a single timelapse session.

When I look at the time lapse feature on a Cam v4, Iā€™m seeing that itā€™ll let me schedule one out to ~1 monthā€™s length, so in your case I think youā€™d want to have a sufficiently large microSD card and plan to reschedule/restart the time lapse periodically.

Does the location also have a reliable Wi-Fi connection for the camera? Iā€™m aware that some of the Wyze cameras will begin recording to a different location on the microSD card after an Internet connection has been lost for half an hour or so, so Iā€™d want to ensure that the location has a consistent Wi-Fi connection to the Internet before starting a project like this, too. I donā€™t know if the recording-without-Internet issue also affects the time lapse feature, so I hope someone else can chime in on that.

I havenā€™t really had much reason to use any of the Wyze Camsā€™ time lapse features, so I donā€™t have a lot of experience with this, but other Forum members who have captured things like the aurora borealis and posted time lapse videos might have better input.

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Crease is correct, there is a 1 month limit on all Wyze Timelapses, so youā€™ll want to set a reminder to go stop the first and start a new one before the first one expires on itā€™s own and leaves you with missing footage.

Lots of people have used these for long term construction timelapses and it works great for that. You just have to manually start a new one every 30 days or less.

Make sure you also have a large SD card. I recommend not recording other events at the same time to make sure all the SD card storage is available to the long timelapse needs.

Pray there are no power outages (it cancels the timelapse). For that reason it can be better to do smaller periods and start a new one more often. But donā€™t do too many on the same camera (I think after like 20-something timelapses on the same camera it canā€™t see them all until you delete some).

Then when done, stitch each timelapse video together into a single video.

Best of luck.

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Thank you both for the reply. We do have a stable wifi connection on this location. We are converting a grass field to turf, so this will be a long project. We were able to record this exact project at another school 8 years ago, with a raspberry Pi and it was an awful experience. Iā€™d love to have a simpler solutionā€¦ Iā€™m all good with going every 2-3 weeks and swapping a microSD card out and restarting the time lapse project.

My newest questions:
What would be the recommended settings time interval for photos 30min or 1hr ā€¦ And can I schedule this for 7a-5p everyday? What size SD card do you recommend?

-Blake

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I think thatā€™s probably a matter of personal preference, depending upon your goals for the project, and I donā€™t have enough experience with this feature to give good guidance (here Iā€™m thinking about how you might calculate storage needs vs. capture interval), but fellow Forum member @ssummerlin recently did a 5-day time lapse with qĢ„ 20ā€² captures and reported a download of only 54 MB. If Iā€™m thinking about this correctly, then that might be a good starting point for some math:

ā€ƒ((3 caps / hr) Ɨ (24 hrs / day)) / (54 MB / 5 days) = 6ā…” captures / MB

I also just did a 10-minute time lapse with the Interval set at 6 Sec, and that shows up as a 15.2 MB download, soā€¦

ā€ƒ((10 caps / min) Ɨ 10 min) / 15.2 MB ā‰ˆ 6.58 captures / MB

If youā€™re doing qĢ„ Ā½ hour captures, thatā€™sā€¦

ā€ƒ(48 caps / day) Ɨ (1 MB / ~6.6 caps) ā‰ˆ 7.27 MB / day

You can cut that last figure in half if youā€™re capturing only once per hour.

Nope. At least I donā€™t see that kind of flexibility within the Wyze app. The Timelapse feature for Cam v4 lets me set Start (date & time), End (date & time), and Interval (03-59 Sec, 01-59 Min, or 01-59 h).

I wouldā€™ve recommended as large as possible (Cam v4 officially supports microSD cards up to 512 GB), but based on the math (if itā€™s correct; probably best to do your own tests and calculations) you should be able to get away with something significantly smaller (and less expensive), especially if youā€™re going to follow @carverofchoiceā€™s good advice with shorter-and-more-frequent time lapse periods and especially if youā€™re going to be swapping cards between those periods.

For simplicityā€™s sake, Iā€™ve been using 256 GB microSD cards in all of my Wyze cameras, but Iā€™m also doing continuous recording on all those. Now that Iā€™ve played with the time lapse feature a little, Iā€™m curious about pulling a card (especially since you mentioned swapping them out) to see where/how these recordings are stored, because I imagine itā€™s different than the serial 1-minute video files I get with continuous recording. :thinking:

Another thought: If the time lapse recordings are stored as regular video files in a standard format on the microSD card, then it should be possible to just pull those off the card and manipulate those to strip out the overnight hours and end up with a daytime-only time lapse as the final product of your project, which seems like your goal here.

Iā€™m eager to see how this turns out and hope that youā€™ll post to Captured on Wyze if you end up doing this.

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Interesting math. Do we know the fps of playback? I would imagine 1 capture is 1 frame. That one frame could be 1/60 or 1/30 sec. Seems you need to figure how many frames you want upon completion.

I am watching the national game on TV, so I am a bit distracted. Too much excitement to do math at this time of the morning.

I have no idea. I was just doing some simple calculations based on what you reported and what I see with my own limited experimentation. When I get ambitious, Iā€™ll pull a card and do some more exploringā€¦yā€™know, for science! :lab_coat::test_tube:

I sā€™pose that might be useful in some situations. I was mostly interested in trying to answer @btesnowā€™s questions about storage requirements, so I focused on the MB:capture ratio.

Having said that, my 10ā€² (qĢ„ 6ā€³ capture) shows in the app as a 3-second video, so thatā€™sā€¦

ā€ƒ100 frames (captures) / 3 seconds ā‰ˆ 33 fps

Same-ish. Iā€™m listening. :ear: cĢ„ :tumbler_glass:

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I just noticed the timelapse interface on the OG does maybe all of the calculations you need.

I was going to test my OG for timelapse and was surprised.

I did get this warning but accepted responsibility.

Cc: @Crease

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@btesnow Hereā€™s one to give you an idea. This one was done with the previous Wyze camera model and they did it over 5 months:

Here are their hints to achieve similar results:

They recommend against swapping SD cards:

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That is funny. I just watched the entire 25-minute video. I even copied the same notes. Donā€™t swap out the SD Card in order to not disturb cam. I was impressed.

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This is another useful link I found about 15 minutes ago.

cc: @carverofchoice

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I know. :slight_smile: I was actually trying to remember this thread to share with this user, but couldnā€™t remember which thread it was in, then suddenly the forum told me you liked my my post in that thread, and because it was about a timelapse, I opened it to see if it was the one I hoping to share with this user, and because it was the one I was thinking of, I copied it over here. So in reality, you saved me the time of having to dig through a ton of other timelapse posts to find this one I was thinking of which already answered several of the questions OP was asking us about.

In a way, youā€™re actually the one who answered all of OPā€™s questions just by liking the right post today to make it easy for me to find the one I had in mind. :joy: So yes, I knew you had just watched that that oneā€¦itā€™s because of you that I found the one I was looking for. So, thanks. :sweat_smile:

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That is amazing you found how to use the system.

Happy to see my information is still being helpful. :smiley: - Jay

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Yeah you did a great job. I think of it whenever someone else mentions they are thinking of doing a long term time lapse. :slight_smile: The way you did it made it turn out great. Then if someone wants it to go a little faster or a little slower they can make slight adjustments, but yours makes for a great reference.

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Happy I just found it. Enjoyed the video.

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I have received my camera and getting it setup now.

I am having a hard time finding an IP allowlist (whitelist) or port #s to get this camera to work with my K12 network.

Does anyone have this available?

-Blake

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The Help Center is your friend:

As far as IP addresses go, the camera will typically try to grab one on your LAN via DHCP (so, whatever is assigned to it by the router running that service). Your schoolā€™s IT folk should be able to assign it a static IP address based on its MAC address if necessary, Iā€™d think. Where remote IP addresses are concerned (which is what I think you were asking about, maybe wondering what to allow through a firewall?), I think Iā€™ve seen some of those mentioned on the Forum, but Iā€™m unaware of a comprehensive list and donā€™t know if or how often those might be subject to change. If that information is necessary, then I suppose you could do your own investigation with a packet sniffer or something, or maybe someone else here has a resource to point to.

If youā€™re trying to keep things tight on the network and are going through the trouble of analyzing packets anyway, then Iā€™d probably take the time to look at the ports that are actually being used, too, because Help Center articles are not always infallible, and the one I linked above says itā€™s two years old.

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