Screen, webcam, or both
Record your screen, your webcam, or your screen with a webcam box in the corner. Drag and resize the box right in the preview.
What it looks like
Demo video coming soon.
Starting a session, then the finished time-lapse.
What it does
Speed presets
From 30x up to 600x, or set a custom interval. At the default 150x, one hour of studying becomes a 24 second clip.
A timer in the video
The elapsed time is stamped into the footage, so the finished clip shows how long you actually sat there. There's also an optional floating timer that stays out of the recording.
Pause and resume
Take a break without ending the session. Paused time doesn't count toward the clock.
Four formats
MP4 by default, plus WebM, MOV, and GIF. Quality options from 720p up to 1440p.
Private by default
Everything runs on your machine and it works offline. No account, no upload, no analytics.
How it works
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Press record
Pick what you want to capture and hit Start Recording.
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Go study
LapseCam quietly saves one photo every few seconds instead of recording constant video, so even a long session stays light on your computer.
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Press stop
The finished video shows up in your Videos folder a few seconds later. That's it.
How it's built
I wrote LapseCam in plain JavaScript on Electron, without a UI framework. Instead of recording real video and speeding it up afterward, it draws the screen and webcam onto a canvas and saves one JPEG every few seconds. A three hour session at the default speed is only around two thousand small photos on disk, so CPU and memory stay flat no matter how long you record.
When you press stop, a bundled ffmpeg binary stitches the photos into the final video and streams its progress back to the UI. The interface itself never touches Node. File writes, encoding, and dialogs all go through a small context-isolated preload bridge, which keeps the renderer sandboxed the way Electron recommends. electron-builder packages the whole thing into an installer and a portable exe.
- Electron
- JavaScript
- Canvas API
- FFmpeg
- Node.js
- electron-builder
FAQ
Is it actually free?
Yes. Free and open source under the MIT license. The tip button is a tip button, not a paywall.
Windows says it "protected your PC". Is something wrong?
No. The exe isn't code signed yet, because signing certificates cost a few hundred dollars a year. Click "More info", then "Run anyway". If that makes you uneasy, the code is public and you can build it from source yourself.
Does it record audio?
No. Time-lapses are silent, so LapseCam never asks for your microphone.
Where do my videos end up?
In Videos\LapseCam by default. You can pick a different folder in Settings.
Is there a Mac or Linux version?
Not yet. I've only built and tested on Windows so far.
Support
LapseCam is free and will stay free. If it saved you an evening in a video editor and you feel like saying thanks, a small tip goes a long way for a college student.
Tip on PayPal