Stop Motion Movie

I have always loved these movies where you see the clouds rushing by. Where a scene is played fast forward through a day, seeing plants open up, are traffic increasing and decreasing over time.
The way that is done is usually taking a picture from the same position with some time interval and then putting them all in a movie. Or you can slowly change the position of your camera.

Anyway, I was working with the webcam last week for my object recognition project so I had the knowledge fresh in my head. I quickly made a program that finds your webcam(s) and then takes pictures with fixed time intervals (adjustable in whole minutes).
I tested it out on the view outside my window hoping for the bad weather that was said to be coming. It did not come. So here you can see a movie of pictures with a one minute interval of clouds (and sometimes a bird).

For those who are interested, I ran this program in Processing 2.2.1 (64 bit) and that worked fine, some earlier version were giving me problems.  My own program can be found here, but you'll have to change certain things to make it fit your own needs.

Webcams

I attached an extra webcam to my laptop, so there is a choice of two. But besides that, the list Processing shows gives different sizes and frame rates for you webcam(s). The list starts with 0, but you can fill in any number from the list and you should get an image.
Find the line that says:

cam = new Capture(this, cameras[0]);

Maybe there's a different number then 0, but that's the place to change it. You should find it around line 26 in the code. I picked a very low resolution for testing, so the video looks bad in my opinion. For future video's I think the only limitation is the size of my hard drive.

Other tweeking

The time step, called 'step' in the code was set to 1, but you can change it to any whole positive number between 1 and 59 you like.
It could be necessary to change the screen size, because that is set to 'size(640,480)' at the moment.
Files are save as 'hour+minute.jpg' in a directory called '/images'. You could change that to your own preferences.

Making the movie

In the original pictures I had the camera wasn't positioned horizontally and I had to rotate them. I did this in Matlab because the rotation was the same for every image and using a script was a lot faster then using Photoshop or some other image program.
When my images where rotated correctly and square again I loaded everything in Windows Movie Maker, which is downloadable for free. Ones they were all loaded it selected them all and under 'Edit' you can set the 'Duration' of every frame. I set it to 0.25 seconds which gave me a smooth running video.

I saved the movie and uploaded it to YouTube. What I think is pretty neat about YouTube is that editing is really simple. There is music to pick from and it even suggests things like video stabilization.

So I hope this was useful for somebody. Nothing is stopping you from placing your webcam somewhere and making a cool movie.

EDIT:
After a request I have modified the program so you take pictures any multiple of seconds.
Click here to download.