How to use LRTimelapse with your camera to make excellent timelapse videos.

markangeltrueman (67)in #photography • 8 years ago (edited)

Hi there Steemit friends.

It wasn’t long after the advent of digital cameras, along with higher capacity memory cards, that the concept of time-lapse photography became a thing that you could do with consumer level equipment. Taking hundreds of photos over a number of hours and then stitching them together into a movie, one frame being one photo, produced some of the most awe inspiring footage ever seen. You can speed up the opening of flowers, the movement of the tides and the constant rolling of cloudscapes.

I'm going to go through how I put together this short time-lapse. I could still do quite a bit of work on it; the post processing only took about 30 minutes and there's still a bit of residual flicker as the light changed a lot in this scene, but it's satisfactory for the purposes of this tutorial. I'm not going to go into the real depths on how to use LRTimelapse as the website has a cracking tutorial. My intention is to just give an overview into how easy it is to get great results using this bit of software.

Stage 1 - Getting the Shots.

All of the shots in this were taken using my Canon 60D with the Magic Lantern firmware installed. Magic Lantern gives you two things that are invaluable when creating a time-lapse.

Intervalometer - allows you to set the camera up to take a photo at intervals (hence the term "intervalometer"). You could use a remote shutter release with intervalometer function if you cant use this firmware or dont have a Canon SLR
Expose to the Right functionality (ETTR) - improves the quality of the photos in changing lighting conditions by automatically adjusting the exposure of the camera throughout the time-lapse to prevent highlights from blowing out. The technical reasoning behind using ETTR is due to the fact that it is easier to recover lost shadow details in RAW images that it is to recover blown highlights. If you always expose "to the right", highlights will never get blown out and you retain the detail in post processing.

There are a load of tutorials online on how to get both of these features up and running so im not going to go into detail on that in this tutorial. It may be that your camera has its own intervalometer and you don't need to add either the updated firmware or a remote release with an intervalometer function. I'm sure you could even do the same on a phone. ETTR is not necessary to create time-lapses, but it just helps improve the quality of certain sequences..

Stage 2 - Post Processing.

So you have your images (for this demo I took 312 images, each 10 seconds apart) and you are about to put them in a sequence to create your video clip. Without post-processing, you will probably end up something like this

As you can see, the image levels are all off, there is flickering and a bit of movement between some shots due to wind. This is where LRTimelapse comes in. This clever bit of software is used to reduce flicker by controlling the transition between frames. It also helps to manipulate image quality and levels (which is done in Adobe Lightroom)

Here is a screenshot of the LRTimelapse user interface.

The simplified workflow is like this

Import your images into LRT
Define a number of keyframes. These are the images that you are going to edit in Lightroom. For this example i created 5 keyframes.
Edit the keyframes in Adobe Lightroom

LRTimelapse, behind the scenes, gives each of these keyframes a lightroom 5 star rating so that you can only show those images using a filter. The way I approach this is to edit the first of the keyframes to my liking by adjusting exposure, curves, saturation etc. Once I'm happy with keyframe one, I copy all the settings to the rest of the keyframes. Then I check keyframe 2; if it needs a slight adjustment then I make it, and copy these settings to the next 3 images. Continue this process until all the keyframes are well exposed but not too different in appearance.

In Lightroom, click the "Save Metadata to File" option to save these changes to the image's metadata file.
Return to LR timelapse and reload. This will reload your 5 keyframes with the changes to exposure, saturation etc.
Run the Auto Transition wizard - this is where the magic happens. Say, for instance, key-frame number 1 has a -2 exposure value and keyframe number 2 has a -1 exposure value, LRTimelapse "ramps" the exposure of all of the images between those key-frames so that the transition is smooth. It does this for pretty much ALL values that you can set in Lightroom.
Once the auto transition is done, it's time to check the time-lapse. In LRTimelapse you can create "Visual Previews". It uses Lightroom to generate images based on the ramping settings and then creates the preview.
If you still have some luminance flicker in this image, you can smooth the luminance curve out using the Visual Deflicker option.
You then save the metadata to the files in LRTImelapse and re-load them in Lightroom. Then you can export the images from Lightroom into your video sequence.
If your image needs a bit of stabilising (mine did due to some wind movement), you can do this in your video editing suite, such as Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premier Pro

If you have any questions, let me know. I read all my comments. Please re-steem and upvote if you have found this interesting or useful.

Thanks