Fungus, Frame Rates and Glaciers

Fungus!
Radiolab has a wonderful podcast on trees, roots, and fungus. It's a delicious introduction that really puts into perspective how interconnected everything is. As in Trees eat Salmon. Don't believe me? Listen to the podcast or read this article.

The same day I listened to this I noticed a few bright white growths in the compost, neat! There's been lots of fungal growth in the compost pile, but I haven't specifically seen this one yet, at least not in these concentrations.

Fungus doesn't move as fast as the bugs we're seeing. I could probably capture one scan per hour and feel pretty good about capturing movement in fungus. But I'm capturing a scan every 15 minutes, and the video playback at this rate causes bug movement to look like a hastily recorded stop motion animation.

Frame Rates!
So I changed the scan to run every 2 minutes, and I've captured a day's worth of footage.

Prior: 1 scan / 15 minutes = 96 scans a day, played back at 30 Frames Per Second = 3 second video.
Now: 1 scan / 2 minutes = 720 scans a day, played back at 30 Frames Per Second = 24 second video.

While I like the smoother movement, I don't necessarily like how long the video lasts. Ooh, but screens these days can all play back at 60 FPS.

60FPS: 1 scan / 2 minutes = 720 scans a day, played back at 60 FPS = 12 second video. Looks even smoother, and plays back faster!

30 FPS	60 FPS

I had an option to either re-encode the video from images at 60FPS, or convert and re-encode the video at 60 FPS. I had not done the latter before, so:

avconv -i sc_20160805.mp4 -f rawvideo -b 50000000 -pix_fmt yuvj420p -vcodec rawvideo -s 768x1080 -y temp.raw

avconv -f rawvideo -pix_fmt yuvj420p -s:v 768x1080 -r 60 -i temp.raw -c:v libx264 sc_20160805at60fps.mp

Not sure what I'll do in the future, for now I'll just continue capturing and encoding videos at 30 FPS.

Glaciers?
This is really all about storage.  I'm capturing a 600 DPI image once every 2 minutes. It's saved as a JPG which greatly reduces the storage space (with some image loss), but still costs 7MB / image.

7MB / image
720 images / day
5 GB / day of storage.

The Raspberry Pi has a 32GB SD Card on it, of which I can use ~28GB. That's only 5 days of storage. Not to mention the terabyte or so of storage I've already offloaded over the past couple years of doing this.

Amazon S3 is a pretty easily accessible storage method, it costs $0.03 / gigabyte. Right now I have around 300GB's on it which costs ~$9 / month. Given the increase in scanning frequency and resolution, I'll increase that by about 150 GB / month (5GB / day * 30 days).

That means I'll be paying an additional $4.50 (150 GB * .03 / GB) every month. Not so bad until a year goes by and now I'm paying $54 / month and increasing.

But I just realized there's this thing called Amazon Glacier, which is sloooooooooooow for retrieving data, but only costs $.007 / GB, and I can setup S3 to automatically dump any files that haven't been used in X days into Glacier storage. This sounds quite ideal. I'd love to here if there are better storage options. I do have a local drive I can store stuff on, but I trust Amazon a lot more than I trust my cheap drive.

Yay for Glaciers!