If I may offer up an alternative way of achieving time lapse video with ZM... Not that the method you folks have discussed won't work, I'm sure it will, but this, IMHO, is a better of achieving the same ends:
Forget mucking with your cameras or monitor setting in any way. Set up your cameras and monitors to record at their maximum possible frame rates and let ZM do its job to capture JPEGs as normal under the /var/cache/zoneminder/events.
But then you create a script to walk the path under events/ with a start & finish paths, and a frames-to-skip setting to pick off one JPEG, skip however many, then pick off another one, and on and on and on till it reaches the finish path. All chosen JPEGs will be copied to a single output dir. Then once you have a continuous stream of JPEGs in that output dir, you hand the output dir off to ffmpeg to create a video from the JPEG sources.
This way you've held onto the real time (non time lapsed) JPEGs and can always refer back to them if need be, but then you can re-run this script as many times as you want to play with the frames-to-skip setting so you can see the shorter or longer time lapse versions of the same start/finish period.
I created a first version of just such a script and here's the result of it uploaded to my YouTube acct. I'm renovating my house and this is a 2 min time lapse video from 7 hrs of work on the 1st day of demolition.
https://youtu.be/sD7nbU0pNP0
I created it using the exact mechanism I explained above. It's footage from a Vivotek camera set to 1280x720, processing at around 20 FPS. I set a frames-to-skip=80.
I'm now upgrading that script to be much more flexible so that you can give it multiple start/finish paths and you can even vary the frames-to-skip setting per start/finish paths so end video can give the appearance of slowing down and speeding up at various sections of your choosing. It's gonna be so cool!!!
![Very Happy :D](./images/smilies/icon_biggrin.gif)
I can't wait to try it out. I'm about 1/2 way thru writing the bash shell script.
Let me know if you're interested in that that. I can share it in a github repo.
Cheers,
Jac
![Cool 8)](./images/smilies/icon_cool.gif)