Dropcam Adds Timelapse Recording
There was a lot of interest and discussion about a recent Axis timelapse app and rival offerings.
Now, here's a new feature from Dropcam that is pretty interesting (see their feature overview). It's a free / included software feature for recorded video and it comes with an option for "'Smart Timelapse' which slows the video at points of detected motion activity."
Below is a user sample clip compressing 24 hours into 2 minutes:
The main drawback is that it only does a timelapse over a period of 1 day. Many commercial users want timelapse over weeks or months (for ongoing projects, etc.). However, since this feature is now just in beta, it would ot be surprising if they eventually expanded it.
From a competitive standpoint, this demonstrates 2 things:
- That Dropcam (or any focused software company) can continue to roll out new value added features in the cloud. Contrast this to Axis AVHS which has made little progress on their video management capabilities.
- How Dropcam has an opportunity to expand into adjacent verticals / niches. This is a risk to a company like Earthcam which charges a ton for such time lapse services.
As a point of clarity to this feature, I found the time lapse can go longer than 24 hours. I downloaded this clip (from a family member's Dropcam) that records at least six nights:
The 'Smart Timelapse' option allows you to build a time lapse clip from only motion events. This allows you to go longer than 24 hours depending on how much recorded activity can fit in a 2 minute clip and how much video storage you buy from Dropcam.
Brian, thanks, pretty interesting!
To confirm, to go longer than 24 hours, you have to use 'smart timelapse'?
And is there any option to show the time or date of the video currently being displayed? I don't know how other timelapse features work, but it would seem useful to have an indicator of the current date/time, especially over longer periods.
It looks like if you chose a period longer than 24 hours, it automatically selects the 'smart timelapse' feature to make the clip.
There isn't an option to overlay time/date information onto the video. I agree that this detail is useful, especially if used for commercial time-lapse projects (ie: timestamp validation of deliveries, etc).
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