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!
The short answer is āyesā; however, Iām not sure if youāll be able to capture everything you want with a single timelapse session.
When I look at the time lapse feature on a Cam v4, Iām seeing that itāll let me schedule one out to ~1 monthās length, so in your case I think youād 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? Iām 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 Iād want to ensure that the location has a consistent Wi-Fi connection to the Internet before starting a project like this, too. I donāt know if the recording-without-Internet issue also affects the time lapse feature, so I hope someone else can chime in on that.
I havenāt really had much reason to use any of the Wyze Camsā time lapse features, so I donāt 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.
Crease is correct, there is a 1 month limit on all Wyze Timelapses, so youāll want to set a reminder to go stop the first and start a new one before the first one expires on itās 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 donāt do too many on the same camera (I think after like 20-something timelapses on the same camera it canāt see them all until you delete some).
Then when done, stitch each timelapse video together into a single video.
Best of luck.
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. Iād love to have a simpler solutionā¦ Iām 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
I think thatās probably a matter of personal preference, depending upon your goals for the project, and I donāt have enough experience with this feature to give good guidance (here Iām 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 20ā² captures and reported a download of only 54 MB. If Iām thinking about this correctly, then that might be a good starting point for some math:
ā((3 caps / hr) Ć (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((10 caps / min) Ć 10 min) / 15.2 MB ā 6.58 captures / MB
If youāre doing qĢ Ā½ hour captures, thatāsā¦
ā(48 caps / day) Ć (1 MB / ~6.6 caps) ā 7.27 MB / day
You can cut that last figure in half if youāre capturing only once per hour.
Nope. At least I donāt 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 wouldāve recommended as large as possible (Cam v4 officially supports microSD cards up to 512 GB), but based on the math (if itās 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 youāre going to follow @carverofchoiceās good advice with shorter-and-more-frequent time lapse periods and especially if youāre going to be swapping cards between those periods.
For simplicityās sake, Iāve been using 256 GB microSD cards in all of my Wyze cameras, but Iām also doing continuous recording on all those. Now that Iāve played with the time lapse feature a little, Iām curious about pulling a card (especially since you mentioned swapping them out) to see where/how these recordings are stored, because I imagine itās different than the serial 1-minute video files I get with continuous recording.
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.
Iām eager to see how this turns out and hope that youāll post to Captured on Wyze if you end up doing this.
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, Iāll pull a card and do some more exploringā¦yāknow, for science!
I sāpose that might be useful in some situations. I was mostly interested in trying to answer @btesnowās questions about storage requirements, so I focused on the MB:capture ratio.
Having said that, my 10ā² (qĢ 6ā³ capture) shows in the app as a 3-second video, so thatāsā¦
ā100 frames (captures) / 3 seconds ā 33 fps
Same-ish. Iām listening. cĢ
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
@btesnow Hereās 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:
That is funny. I just watched the entire 25-minute video. I even copied the same notes. Donāt swap out the SD Card in order to not disturb cam. I was impressed.
This is another useful link I found about 15 minutes ago.
cc: @carverofchoice
I know. I was actually trying to remember this thread to share with this user, but couldnāt 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, youāre actually the one who answered all of OPās questions just by liking the right post today to make it easy for me to find the one I had in mind. So yes, I knew you had just watched that that oneā¦itās because of you that I found the one I was looking for. So, thanks.
That is amazing you found how to use the system.
Happy to see my information is still being helpful. - Jay
Yeah you did a great job. I think of it whenever someone else mentions they are thinking of doing a long term time lapse. 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.
Happy I just found it. Enjoyed the video.
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
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 schoolās IT folk should be able to assign it a static IP address based on its MAC address if necessary, Iād 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 Iāve seen some of those mentioned on the Forum, but Iām unaware of a comprehensive list and donāt 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 youāre trying to keep things tight on the network and are going through the trouble of analyzing packets anyway, then Iād 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 itās two years old.