http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=5149646&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=00ADEF&fullscreen=1

Santa Ponsa from Sean McCormack on Vimeo.

As you may or may not know, I’m a huge fan of Timelapse movies. Now I haven’t exactly been going around the world shooting stuff like Ross Ching, but I have shot timelapse all around Connemara, County Clare, in Scotland, London and even Mallorca in Spain. I even begged Jeffrey Friedl to help in the form of writing a script that allowed me to create panning and zooming using only Lightroom metadata.

Well last night, with a lot of help from some buddies on the Lightroom SDK forum, I managed to do something that I’d been hinting at to Timothy Armes.. I wrote a post process plugin, that allows me to send the exported files to FFMPEG and create a movie from them. FFMPEG is a cross platform, open source video application. It doesn’t come compiled and needs substantial massaging to get it compiled. Still I found a compiled version for both Windows (untested) and Mac OS X.
Now the plugin is very fragile and needs a lot of polish. I’m not sure it’s something I intend releasing, because of this fragility. However, if you are a timelapse creator that uses Lightroom, please contact me and we can test and work on it further. Basically if you mix the panning ability from Jeffrey’s Pan script and this Export plugin, you can pretty much create cool timelapse within Lightroom.

The movie at the top was creating using panning from the Pan script and exported from Lightroom via my export plugin.