Two hours of cloud movement compressed to 60 seconds of video. Made in Seattle, October 7, 2008, through a rather filthy eastward-facing window in my house.

I used my crappy old Canon ZR-10 DV camera attached to my Powerbook via firewire. I used Processing to capture one frame every four seconds. The (very simple) code is below.

I feel a little silly not realizing for years that I could use this camera as a "webcam". I just plugged it in, and Processing had no trouble finding it and capturing frames from it, albeit somewhat slowly, which was just fine for this use.

This is a 400x300 version. If you click on the blue Vimeo link to get to the Vimeo page for this video, you can also get the original 720x480 version.

/**
* camera01
*
* Matthew Conroy ( www.matthewconroy.com )
*
**/

import processing.video.*;
Capture myCapture;

Movie myMovie;

MovieMaker mm; // declare movieMaker object

int movieFPS=30;

int frameWidth=720;
int frameHeight=0;

float nextTime=0;
float captureDelay=4000; /* the number of milliseconds between frame captures */

void setup()
{
size(frameWidth,frameHeight);

mm = new MovieMaker(this, width,height,"output.mov", movieFPS, MovieMaker.H263, MovieMaker.HIGH);

myCapture = new Capture(this, width, height, "DV Video", 30);
}

void captureEvent(Capture myCapture) {
myCapture.read();
}

void draw() {

image(myCapture, 0, 0);
while (millis() println(millis());
nextTime += captureDelay;
mm.addFrame();
}

void keyPressed() {
if (key == ' ') {
mm.finish(); // finish movie if space bar is pressed
exit();
}
}