I'm still tweaking my process, but I'm getting closer to a final setup. I can' t count the number of times over the years that I've found dozens or hundreds of forum posts about precisely what I'm working on, but those posts end with a cliff-hanger and no resolution. I also often find people who post "fixed!" but then do not share how! Drives me bonkers. I'm glad others appreciate finding full and complete journeys like this one. I hope some day in the distant future some poor soul is able to find this post and that it will help them solve their issue as well. Or maybe someone else will decide that they too would like to create a time-lapse workflow from Blue Iris footage and with this guide they'll have what they need for a complete walk-thru.

I have 1 dedicated sky camera currently, but will have 2 going when I'm done. These cameras do like I said above where they write their video to one folder, then the retention settings move it to another folder and convert to an MP4 time-lapse when they do that.

I'm not happy with the speed of that conversion, but after talking with support it seems there is nothing I can do about that. It appears that FFMPEG is not able to process the BVR files directly today, so I have to rely on Blue Iris to convert them, but Blue Iris does not use much of the CPU resources available during exports. I upgraded my camera server and now have a ton of CPU and RAM available, yet I've only seen my CPU hit maybe 20% load while recording all 9 channels and exporting at the same time. One side note is that I was previously having Blue Iris resize the video from 5MP down to 2MP (1080p) because the next step in my process was limited to 1080. I recently changed that to leave the source 5MP video alone and expected that to slow down the conversion but it did not appear to change at all. Just makes me believe there is a LOT of room for performance improvements with the export process.

In the end, all that means for me is that I'll have to schedule my daily batch process to run later than midnight. I'll probably have to wait until 5 or 6AM each day to process the previous day's time-lapse. FFMPEG should be able to combine the segments for me no problem and then my other steps will take over to get that final video published to YouTube (that part is more of a pain than it should be as well!).

While I'm testing things though, because the export is so slow, I have to turn off the scheduled exports if I want to do any manual exports or else I won't be able to work on things for days. It took me 2 weeks to get all of the footage I wanted from July 4 exported for example, and that entire time I could not have my weather cam time-lapse going because the export queue was already so clogged.

It would be REALLY REALLY nice if I could find an external BVR conversion to MP4 process that was multi-threaded, or at least allowed multiple instances to be running, so I could export with all the performance I have available on the hardware I have.

travlynman wrote: ↑Thu Jul 25, 2024 12:49 pm For stitching together daily clips, FFMPEG is indeed a powerful tool, but handling such scripts can get technical.

I'm an IT guy, so technical is my bread and butter. For this project, the stitching has to be automated and scripted. I'm not going to spend any time in a video editor.

I'm pretty much done with this part of the project. You can see one of my favorite recent videos here:

https://youtu.be/3W3Nf8yJT68?si=-JQCqn8WLhItvYag

BlueIris is exporting the clips automatically at this point and I'm picking them up the next day and combining them with FFMPEG. Then I'm using SyncBack Pro to move them to my Google Drive where Zapier picks them up and publishes them to YouTube. I'm still tweaking a couple pieces of the scripts, but it's working. Some day if I can find a tool that can convert the BVR files to MP4 outside of BlueIris, I'd like to change that. Not just for this project, but for anytime I want to export an entire day of video from my other cameras. Exporting more than a few clips is PAINFUL currently. REALLY hope I can find a better way to do that someday.

As soon as I can make the time to run a new network line up to my roof, I'll add a second view of the sky.

Thanks again to those with suggestions, and I hope this thread helps someone out in the future!