How to create a Time Lapse with MxControlCenter

Legacy Software MxControlCenter
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Introduction

The objective of this post is to explain how to generate a Time Lapse using MxControlCenter. For this purpose we will use MxControlCenter 2.5.3.5 x64 bit and a Q25 camera.

Procedure

Step 1. Open MxControlCenter and select the camera from the Layouts list and then click on the Player icon.

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Once in player mode the Player window turns from grey to blue and we can click on the Export icon and the Export List will open.

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Step 2. In the Export List move the sliders and select the dates for the beginning and end of the time lapse

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Step 3. Select Time lapse from the Export as drop-down menu and click Settings. A new window will open.

Step 4. In Export Format Settings configure the settings for the Time Lapse.

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We will explain now the different parameters:

  • Fixed resolution: to set the resolution of the image to a fixed value which might be different than the resolution used for the recordings.
  • Use recording resolution: to use the same resolution as the recorded images. If you tick the Start new clip when resolution changes every time the recording changed resolution a new video will be created.
  • Fixed frame rate: This is the number of images per second. 25 is the frame-rate for PAL while you should select 30 for NTSC.
  • Only use event images: means that the images used will be only coming from events and not from continuous or history recording.
  • Minimum interval between frames: this is the time between images being used for the time lapse.
  • Container: this is the video container and file extension, it might be AVI (.avi) , MPEG-4 (.mp4) or Quicktime (*.mov).
  • Codec: video codec being used , it depends on the codecs installed on the system, in our case we selected DivX v3 MPEG-4 (Low -Motion)
  • And finally a selector for either Quality or Performance.

Step 5. Click OK to start the export of the Time Lapse.

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Note 1: Depending on the length of the recordings and the settings applied this process can take a few minutes or hours.

Known Limitation: If MxFFS with Archive was used to store the recordings then MxControlCenter must access the recordings via camera. This means that the Exporting process may take a long time.