Practical Mac / Glenn Fleishman
Smile, bad guy — you're on EvoCam-era

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She and her husband are resisting the full-on home alarm system — which my wife and I are happy was already installed in the home we live in — but there's got to be a better way to detect, record and report malefactors.

If you're a Mac OS 8, 9, or X user and you own or are willing to buy a video camera — even Apple Computer's tethered $149 iSight camera — you can have your own inexpensive monitoring and reporting system with EvoCam (www.evological.com, $20, free trial). It's not the same as a private security guard or an alarm system, but it can be used effectively to record what's happening while you're away or asleep.

EvoCam lets you use any video-input source as a monitoring window. You can record at certain intervals or times of day, or you can create sensors. Each sensor is a rectangular area that you draw within a video window. That area is then monitored for movement. If EvoCam senses movement within that sensor's rectangle (a change in its captured pixels over a few seconds), it can carry out a task you choose.

For instance, a sensor can trigger such actions as recording video or saying a phrase in synthesized speech: "Stop, perp!" You can set sensitivity from low to high to avoid triggering alarms for shadows and birds.

You can choose to send or upload an image either on a timed basis (every five seconds, say, or every 10 minutes) or when a EvoCam sensor is triggered.

EvoCam can upload an image to an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) server that feeds a Web-site page; send an image via e-mail; save an image to a folder; or archive a series of images as a stop-motion QuickTime movie or individual files. You don't have to choose from these four options: It can perform all four for each triggered recording.

The utility of uploading an image to a location other than the local network means that if someone steals the computer, you would have a record of exactly when the computer was stolen. That has actually worked in catching a few thieves red-handed, according to news reports.

EvoCam has options for identifying the images, including a clock overlay and badges, which are either static or moving images. You can apply filters to the captured video or images, which range from useful (increasing brightness) to bizarre (applying a ripple effect over the video).

You can also use multiple video sources to create the equivalent of those guard rooms in which someone is monitoring many cameras at once. Video footage won't stop crime, but it can't hurt to put criminals on candid camera for easier capture and conviction.

Happier video: When you're not fighting crime with your video camera or iSight, you could play instead by using three products from Boinx Software (www.boinx.com).
 
iRecordNow ($14.95, free trial) turns an iSight into a video camera with simple settings and a big software record button. You can achieve the same results with substantially more complexity using the free QuickTime Broadcaster software (www.apple.com/quicktime/products/broadcaster/) along with directions from O'Reilly Network editor Derrick Story (www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2003/07/01/isight.html).

Because the iSight's video quality is reasonably high and it's much cheaper than a stand-alone video camera, it's worth considering as a recorder if you have a laptop or a well-located desktop computer.

Boinx's iStopMotion ($39.95, free trial, Mac OS X 10.2.5+) is a lot of fun, reminding me of the stop-motion clay-modeling animation I made in elementary school many moons ago with the very latest in film technology available at the time.

Stop-motion movies require that you know precisely where you left off so that each new frame is a continuation of the one before. iStopMotion builds in tools that let you see the most recent frames in two ways.

You can choose to preview just the previous frame combined with the current live video, or, through the Onion Skinning setting, you can mix in up to five more frames. That lets you see the motion's progress, which helps smooth out transitions.

A blinking slider can be set off or on a scale from slow to fast to flip back and forth between the mixed display (with or without onion skinning) and the live display. Again, this helps make motion smoother.

iStopMotion also has a time-lapse mode, which interests me more, in which you record images at regular intervals of seconds, minutes or hours. You could set up photography of a growing plant, the traffic outside your office (I'm working on a piece I call, "Waiting for the Number 48"), or even a drive across the country — as Chuck Goolsbee of the Bothell company Digital Forest did last summer (www.goolsbee.org/roadtrip/).

The silliest and most charming of Boinx's video products is a screen saver called MiracleSight (free, Mac OS X 10.3), which displays colored dots of varying sizes when it detects motion across the recording video.

Glenn Fleishman writes the Practical Mac column for Personal Technology and about technology in general for The Seattle Times and other publications. Send questions to gfleishman@seattletimes.com. More columns at www.seattletimes.com/columnists

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