How To Create Time Lapse Movie of a Website in Mac OS X
Time Lapse Movies of websites can be great fun if the sites content changes constantly but in a predictable manner. Sites like delicious, digg, reddit and hacker news are good candidates. The time lapse movie of reddit was created in the following manner
- Enable Fast User Switching and Guest Account in OS X if you want to use the mac while it is taking the screenshots. Since good time lapse movies require hours of footage this is a good idea unless you have a spare mac around.
- Login as the Guest User
- Open the site in safari and maximize safari to fill the width and height of the screen. Hide the tool bar, status bar and bookmarks bar. Also create a folder on the desktop named "screenshots"
- Open Script Editor (Applications -> AppleScript -> ScriptEditor ) and paste the following code into it.
- Change the number 200 to 5 and sleep 180 to sleep 10 and run the script for a trial run.
- If all goes well with the trail change the numbers back and run the apple script and return to your normal user account. The script will finish in 10 hours and the screenshots folder in the Guest Desktop will have 200 screenshots in it.
- Import the screenshots into iPhoto (This is due to iMovie not ordering the screenshots properly if imported directly into it )
- Now open iMovie and open the photos browser. Drag the just imported photos in iPhoto to the project area.
- Right click the first image and open "Project Properties". In Timing Tab, select "Initial Video Placement" as crop and click OK
- Click the first image and select Window->Clip Adjustments from the menu. Enter Duration as 0.4s and make sure that "Applies to all still is checked
- Add Music if desired and export the movie using Share->Export Movie or Share->Export Using Quicktime if you have Quicktime Pro.