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I own a Nikon D700, which has in-camera support for taking time-lapse photos, but I need advice on the easiest and best software solutions for processing the resulting heap of images. I accept that the best software may not be the easiest, and vice versa. Open-source would be great, but I'm open to commercial solutions as well. I've tried Picasa's movie-making feature, but found it to be kludgy and missing many useful options. What do you recommend?

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5 Answers

up vote 17 down vote accepted

If you are on a Mac, one of the best ways is using Automator, which you can use to do basic cropping/editing and conversion to video (although this part usually requires Quicktime Pro).

There is a good walkthough here: How to Make a Time-Lapse Video from Stills

Also, a great open source solution is to use ffmpeg, but it is a much more technical path to take, so keep that in mind.

There are lots of examples out there, here's one example: Creating Time Lapse with ffmpeg

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2  
+1 for ffmpeg. It makes it as simple as one command to make a video. Superb. – NickAldwin Jul 23 '10 at 17:50
4  
"as simple as one command" is relative. If you have no experience with that sort of thing, figuring out a command like ffmpeg -i %03d.jpg -r 15 -croptop 180 -cropbottom 180 -s hd1080 -vcodec libx264 -vpre hq -crf 16 rollins_1080.mp4 (example command for turning set of time lapse images into a movie) might be near impossible – davr Jul 24 '10 at 4:40
+1 for ffmpeg I've used this in the past with great results. – Alastair Jul 26 '10 at 11:26
Thanks, I will try ffmpeg. Fortunately, I'm comfortable with the commandline, and those options look like exactly what I was looking for. – Naseer Jul 30 '10 at 19:09
up vote 8 down vote

You answer lies in Lightroom and this free software plugin for lightroom http://lrtimelapse.com/

The great thing about using lightroom for a timelapse is that you can easily crop,edit thousands of images with a simple click. You can then make a slideshow.

Here is a blog post that shows how to install the slideshow video templates for lightroom:

http://forum.lrtimelapse.com/Thread-how-to-install-the-slideshow-and-video-templates-free-and-pro

If you want to take your timelapse photography a step further you can make gradual changes and deflicker the timelapse within lightroom with the lrtimelapse plugin.

LRTimelapse will take your movies to the next level. It allows you to continuously change Adobe Lightroom or Camera RAW development parameters over the time enabling sort of key-frame animations like in video-processing. The great advantage over post processing in your favorite video production software is the way higher quality of pre processing on a RAW-file basis. Of course you can work with JPG as well.

Examples and use cases

  • Alter white balance and other parameters over the time (for example for sun sets)
  • Make the "Holy Grail" - (day to night transition) easy peasy
  • Deflicker Make Ken-Burns effects (pan/zoom) Fade in / fade out
  • Continuously saturate / desaturate
  • and many more...
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Thats some slick software. – rfusca♦ Jun 21 '12 at 17:23
Note that the free version is limited to 400 stills. Non-free is 89€ ($118 USD at the moment). – tyblu Jan 5 at 2:36
thank you for this new information. At the time I posted this there was no limit in the amount of stills you could use. – xtarsy Feb 7 at 9:10
up vote 4 down vote

Ha. Nobody mentioned free windows alternatives.

I've been using windows live movie maker with good results. It is as simple as dragging your pictures into the timeline, selecting them, setting a time for each (24 fps is around 0,04 seconds per picture) and exporting :)

(It auto-adds black vertical bars to your 3:2 or 4:3 aspect ratio pictures if you export to 16:9 HD video, but you may prefer cropping them beforehand. I've used image magick for windows for batch cropping - add a comment if you want more details about this)

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I'm not sure if a blog post would be appropriate for this kind of work. Information on the web is sort of spread out. I'm available for that :) – JoséNunoFerreira Jun 20 '12 at 15:04
I'd love to see a blog post on timelapse ....pop into the chat and we can discuss. – rfusca♦ Jun 20 '12 at 19:12
I'll be home in about 4h, will do! – JoséNunoFerreira Jun 21 '12 at 16:28
up vote 1 down vote

Personally I find that using Adobe Premiere Pro to make timelapses is best for me. It offers super flexibility titles audio and the ability to mix in true video. Additionally you can create faux pans if you import your images larger than your video resolution.

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up vote 0 down vote

You could try Blender, it is open source but personally I think there would be a learning curve for it.

It also has video editing capabilities so if you aren't able to fork out for the commercial offerings it could be alternative for you.

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I'm too dumb to get Blender to make time-lapses for me. How do you do it? – tyblu Jan 5 at 2:37

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