Using the timelapse presets: a video tutorial

I've put together a short video showing the making of the timelapse video from the previous post using the Presets I gave out on Lightroom News. Here I cover creating the slideshow, exporting and a little about where the presets live. I'm also trying out a new feature of the video capture program ScreenFow: Export to YouTube. You'll need to click through to YouTube itself to see the video at a larger size as the embed size here is quite small.

Lightroom timelapse.

With the new preset/template combination I post on Lightroom News, I've been working on a few ideas in relation to Lightroom timelapse. I've been expanding the presets and of course making new sequences.

Here's a quickie I finished today. Music is really basic, knocked out in Reason. Mac users could knock something out in Garageband. There's a whole host of programs for PC also.

View on ExposureRoom

Timelapse Movies from Lightroom

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.

Panning Timelapse using Lightroom

Santa Ponsa Beach HD Time Lapse from Sean McCormack on Vimeo.

When thinking about possible feature requests for Lightroom, I began thinking about time lapse photography applications. Now I'm far from an expert on this, but I have done more than enough basic time lapse videos to be familiar with it. Generally I've been using either my Canon TC-80N3 intervalometer, or using EOS utility and a Watched folder in Lightroom. When done I do a video sized export (eg 1280X720 for HD) and use Quicktime Pro to generate the actual video using Open Image Sequence.
While I'm happy with these, I've seen much cooler videos online and from my mate Chris Tierney. Chris uses After Effects to do his panning, and to be blunt, it's well beyond what I need or could afford.
While discussing this with fellow Lightroom folks, coder extraordonaire Jeffrey Friedl came up with a script that made use of Lightroom Metadata cropping to achieve what I wanted. Now Jeffrey will be blogging about the script and hosting it shortly. So by way of introduction, I'm showing a recent timelapse video that uses the panning from Jeffrey's script. I'll defer to Jeffrey on instructions, but in the meantime, check out my Santa Ponsa Time Lapse.