Raspberry Pi 4 HQ Stop Motion Video "A Day in the Life of Murphy"

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This project uses the Raspberry Pi 4B , 12 Mp HQ camera, and telephoto lens provided by Element 14 to create a Stop Motion Video.

Here is the link to present published version Stop Motion video on You Tube, " A Day in the Life of Murphy" which I hope you find entertaining.

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https://youtu.be/QMbdviNFOes

comments and feedbacks appreciated. 

The HQ raspberry pi camera is awesome. I'm in love. The telephoto lens is really great too, I still have some learning curve on getting it focused for closeups and long shots. In the end, a couple different lenses would be useful.

This was a really good guide to get started in using the Raspberry Pi for Stop Motion photography

https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/projects/push-button-stop-motion

My code isnt exactly the same, but close.

I used an industrial pushbutton mounted in medium density fiberboard (MDF) which made it durable and solid, and wired into the GPIO to trigger the photo taking.

The raspberry Pi can create mp4 from the frames automatically using the ffmpeg -r 10 -i animation/frame%03d.jpg -qscale 2 animation.mp4, however this command could not handle the HQ photos, and the resulting mp4 was not useable.

I used Movie Maker to stitch the frames together and create the video, however, some scenes had well over 300 frames, my PC could not handle all those graphics and would get seriously bogged down.

To process the project, each scene was compiled to mp4, and then the final video imported the individual scenes of mp4 into Movie Maker.

This solution is practical in that scenes can be moved in the video or reshot without messing up the whole project.

Before shooting, I came up with a storyboard, and then had to setup the stage for each scene.

As the scenes were videoed, new ideas came up, some challenges required scene changes, and of course some concurrent engineering :-)

Photo sessions and editing were very time consuming. I used the RPi as the photo taker and real time video monitor.

At the end of each photography session, I'd WinSCP into the RPi from my W10 PC , fetch the frames taken, backup and create a quick mp4 for checking for bad frames, inconsistent frames, and video flow.  After the video was all stitched together, then soundtracks added.

The burrito scene setup:

The set for the Star Trek scene.                

The set for the fiery butt launch scene

The python code:

from picamera import PiCamera

from time import sleep

import RPi.GPIO as GPIO

GPIO.setmode(GPIO.BOARD) # use pin numbers

GPIO.setup(11, GPIO.IN,pull_up_down=GPIO.PUD_DOWN)

camera = PiCamera()

frame=1

while True:

    try:

        if GPIO.input(11) == GPIO.HIGH:

            camera.start_preview()

            sleep(5)

            # camera.stop_preview()

            camera.capture('/home/pi/MurphyIndigestion/frame%03d.jpg' % frame)

            frame += 1

            print (frame)

            #

    except KeyboardInterrupt:

        camera.stop_preview()

        break