Reassembling Sutro

A couple of remixes of the Sutro sunset timelapse I posted a few weeks back. Here are two pictures taken about 17 minutes apart, chopped up into a 4×6 grid and interleaved (interwoven?):

Chopping up the 400 individual shots into 180×180 chunks was easy with ImageMagick (hooray Cactuslab installer!)

Sorting through 11,000 tiles and stitching them together, not so much.

The camera drifted and wiggled a bit (I was outside and it got windy), so let’s just say the alignment was a bitch (never mind the esoteric nature of the ImageMagick command to jam them back together).  I kind of gave up on IM at that point and jumped over to OmniGraffle to reconstitute the images — I dropped the tiles into a table grid, punched some holes in one set and overlaid it onto the other full picture (and thus got around the otherwise ugly alignment issue). This should give you a hint to the workflow:

(For 11 years now, OmniGraffle has been my go-to vector drawing app — it’s worth its weight in gold. Basically anything cool looking in this blog (including the Islands of SF map) was made in OG. Thanks @joelpage!)

Here’s another grid, each tile coming from a different time:

What I’d like to do build a 4×6 HTML table and in each cell, play back tiles at a different speed (or simply choose a random time for each cell). If anyone is interested I can upload the 11,000 tiles somewhere. (Image name format is Sutro-001-0.jpg / Sutro-400-23.jpg, where the first three digit number is the time sequence, and 0-23 indicate the tile location — the numbers in the punched out image should make it  clear).

A couple of neighbors went to town on the original timelapse, included the esteem’d @obeyken, aka Murphlabs, creator of the year-long History of the Sky timelapse, went the composite grid route:

While the honourable @rrmutt (aka rotormind) attacked the video with ffmpeg and the Python image library:

Column time-slicing — time goes from left to right:

and a video with time marching through the pixel columns, right to left: