Articles about "timesmoother"

Finally here is another video I just finished after some long weeks of tweaking TimeSmoother, my Lightroom timelapse plugin, and rendering timelapses. “A fast look on Oberstdorf” is a collection of timelapse clips I shot while I was on holidays in Oberstdorf.

Next I’m going to create a Video containing some of these timelapses combined with some of the video clips I shot.

All shots are RAW DSLR stills, most of them shot on the Sony Alpha 850, some on the A77. I edited the images with Lightroom and TimeSmoother, my timelapse plugin for Lightroom, and then rendered them to 4K ProRes 4444 with AfterEffects. This video is cut in Premiere and slightly graded in SpeedGrade to finish. This project again showed me, how slow Premiere is and how bad the Workflow with SpeedGrade is. It’s no fun that Premiere exports all movies as DPX files when sending to SpeedGrade although SpeedGrade is ProRes compatible. I had about 160GB of DPX files for 3 minutes at 4K with 35MB per file.

I’ll soon publish some more information about TimeSmoother and offer an alpha version. With this I’ll present my improved workflow to give an usage example.

Here is the demonstration video of my Lightroom Timelapse Plugin – the working title is Time Smoother. The purpose of this plugin is to help to smooth timelapses with changing exposure especially like sunrise (night-to-day) and sunset (day-to-night) timelapses.

If you’re interested in timelapsing and this plugin/workflow please give me feedback below this post, on Twitter (@irieger) or in the comments on Vimeo.

On vacation I shot many timelapses, some of them sunrises or sunsets. At this time I only knew one tool to help smoothing RAW timelapses in conjunction with Adobe Lightroom and this wasn’t working as I expected the times I tried it and I always had to manually work around. And the new version is very expensive. So while still on vacation, after getting up at 3:00am to shoot a night-to-day timelapse and setting up the cameras I had plenty of time to think about the problem. A solution of how easy this could be processed came to my mind and I asked a friend experienced in Python to give me a “kickstart” with a little code example of how I could process the XMP data.

He sent me a small example which I used to write an algorithm that fit my needs. The script was really simple but after coming back after the vacation I decided try to make this a Lightroom plugin. The Lightroom Plugin API (Application Programming Interface) is relatively easy to handle but also is missing many features. So I ended making a Lightroom frontend which then executes the script in the background. I’d prefer to have a native plugin handling everything in Lightroom itself but with the current API it’s not possible. So for now we have to write the metadata, run the plugin and then load the metadata from the files as described in the video. But I hope this will change in a coming Lightroom release. I’ve sent a feature request to Adobe.

Currently working

• smooth out the exposure between first and last image
• use keyframes to better specify the brightness curve
• works with XMP sidecar files or photos with integrated XMP data
• works on Mac OS (tested on Mountain Lion) and Windows

Planned next

• tests with files from different cameras
• add white balance smoothing
• handling of exposure bracketing for HDR timelapses
• more depending on my needs and your feedback

Thank you for reading and now please send me your thoughts.