Timelapse Movies from Lightroom

June 14, 2009 @ 11:03AM

Timelapse Movies from Lightroom

By Sean McCormack ...

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.

Comments

Anonymous

2 years ago

Hi there. I actually Jeffrey's script didn't work for me so I modified it and used Virtual Dub to create the video. But I've been wondering if it is possible to build the whole process into a plugin?

I'm not familiar with the Lightroom SDK (or Perl for that matter) so haven't got round to attempting doing this yet.

If you don't mind sharing your plugin I would love to give it a try. my email is lim.sim@gmail.com

Lim

Anonymous

2 years ago

Hey Limmy, Can you point to some of your work and give me your OS details?

Anonymous

2 years ago

Hi Sean,Here's a couple of timelapses I've done in the past.

http://vimeo.com/1748545http://vimeo.com/1713718

Nothing amazing but would love to hear any comments you may have.

I'm using Vista at the moment.

Anonymous

2 years ago

I am totally interested in this plug-in!

Anonymous

2 years ago

Hey nikongirl,Can I get an email address (you can type name at whereever dot whatever, if you want to avoid email harvesters) and some of your current timelapses? Also what OS are you using?

Anonymous

2 years ago

Hi Sean,

I'm interested in the plugin.

My time lapse stuff can be seen here: http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=time%20lapse&w;=14334258%40N00

chrismar -at- gmail -dot- com

Thanks!

Anonymous

2 years ago

Hi SeanPut me down to buy the Time lapse plug in when available. I am just starting to play and was looking for software but because i love and mainly use LR this would be ideal.

david

Anonymous

2 years ago

Hey there,

Much interest in the plugin here too.

Some of my timelapse are here…

http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=timelapse&w;=68022058%40N00

email patrick dot dell at gmail dot com