Setting up Time Lapse image capture

[Southcross]

My camera has dual Video and Image capture... I am trying to set up a general "Time Lapse" image capture every 15 mins, and while I got it to "work", I can tell ZM doesn't' really like it.

I defined the options of 3600 second "Section Length" and a "Frame Skip" of 900 seconds, to make it save a snapshot every 15 minutes and group them every hour. It seemed to work just fine all night long, at some point this morning my camera "skipped" a frame (Signal drop?). This created an "Alarm" event (which I am OK with), closing the old Event and making a new Event after the alarm (again I am OK with this)... BUT... zmaudit.pl ran, saw the new event as "empty" since it had yet to save a frame, so it deleted it?

[Southcross]

hmmm... seems that I'm now getting 20+ "Signal" based alarms, for at least the last hour or so. Even with the image capture turned all the way down to 1fps. :/

I had a thought, related to the "signal" alarms, can I set the "Time lapse" to record off of the ZM video capture daemon? I see it as an option to record off a remote ZM server monitor, can I make a circular reference to 127.0.0.1 or localhost/?

[Southcross]

any suggestions? Even with a "remote" connection to itself, it still has signal drops causing false alarms.

[Southcross]

what I finally wound up with... and it seems to work better than anything combination of settings I tried. My goal was to obtain 1 or 2 photos per hour, but what what I wound up with is 3 to 8 per hour. My camera's FPS varies based on the amount of light, most likely due to slow shutter speeds of low light, daylight I get about 20fps and at night only about 5fps.

Using the "Preset: Remote Zoneminder", and IP address 127.0.0.1.

The capture rate I initially experimented with 1fps and .5fps... I started to note that the log was stating errors and that it was auto-throttling up to 3.33 FPS, so I started to use that number.

I initially set the section length to 3600 (1 hour) and the Frame Skip to 1800 (at 1fps that would be 2 frames per hour). This was causing the scripts in ZM to detect an "empty" alarm and auto-delete it. Same with 900 Frames. I brought the section length down to 1800s (.5 hour) and the Frame Skip down to 600 (at up to 3.33 FPS this should yield a photo every 3 minutes? Under daylight I seem to be getting photos about every 4 minutes).

I experimented with Motion Frame Skip (10) and Alarm Frame Count (2) to try to tweak out the "signal drop"s, since they have stopped, I stopped tweaking these numbers, the values may not be necessary.

[jacomoman]

I realize this discussion is over a year old, but I just replied to another post related to time lapse video you should take a look at:

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=6681&p=96337#p96337