# A good workflow for timelapse starting with Lightroom? I'm stuck...



## cayenne (Jan 9, 2014)

Hi all,

I'm trying to work from Lightroom to do a timelapse.
I've been scouring and found that the most popular google searches show me that an addon, LRTimelapse is pretty nice...however, it has its shortcomings and I'm looking for a native tools type solution.

I have played around and have been able to get Photoshop to do timelapse, but the trouble is, I can't get it to work smoothly with the photos cataloged in LR.

I am a bit of a noob with both of them, so please forgive me if this is easy.

My first run of images about 500 is in jpg, I'll be doing this again in RAW or maybe small RAW to be able to adjust them better.

I import them into LR with all my other images shot that day, but different file names to differentiate them.

I've done my adjustments and tried to select all in LR and send over to PS. I tried to send them over all as a smart object, and promptly crashed my computer.

I've started in PS, I opened it up, started with a Video Layer and pointed it to the image files where LR stored them. This worked ok, however, none of my adjustments are on the images (no cropping, no color, etc).

So, while I was able to get a timelapse working with PS..it isn't working and playing well with LR which I was hoping to do.

I bought the Adobe CS6 Production Premium Suite, before they want to the CC rental model, and I also bought Lightroom 5.

I was hoping to somehow use LR -> to PS or even Premier or AE if that would work, but I just can't figure how to adjust my images in LR and somehow send them with corrections intact, to another app that I own to create the timelapse and render the video.

Any and all suggestions greatly appreciated!!

cayenne


----------



## yorgasor (Jan 9, 2014)

From lightroom, I do my corrections and export to JPGs. From there, I import the series into Premiere and adjust the framerate. This was my first attempt to do a timelapse:

Night Sky In D

I've been finding Premier difficult to work with, it doesn't always do what I think it should do, but I hope to get better at it eventually.


----------



## emag (Jan 9, 2014)

cayenne said:


> I'm trying to work from Lightroom to do a timelapse.



Couple things I've done:

I found a 24fps (plugin? whatever it's called) for LR that is selected in the slideshow tab, came from a British man's website. Works well for rendering the video but takes quite a while to render with large images (hours). I have PhotoshopCC but don't use it at all for TL.

If starting from jpegs I'll often use Startrails to create an avi, framerate and resolution are limited but not horribly so.

Framerate and deflickering can be done with Virtualdub. I also use FreeMake to change video formats (avi, mp4). In fact, on those rare occasions I take video with my DSLR, I use FreeMake to convert the file to something usable.

I used to be quite anal about using large, full resolution frames....but find that much smaller, lower resolution frames do quite well, although it's good to have the raws for astro.

Note that I do this for my own pleasure only, if you're considering commercial work you'll likely need more professional (i.e., expensive) software. If the workflow you describe is strictly for your own pleasure......it sure seems like a LOT of work and time.

I post timelapses at youtube\emagowan, if yer so inclined feel free to ask me about any of them. Most of my astro timelapses were done from raws with LR. I did one (I admit, a stupid one, but hey, the weather was truly crappy!) of my cat sleeping, one with flicker and the other deflickered in Virtualdub.


----------



## hgraf (Jan 10, 2014)

I import all the RAW images into Lightroom, adjust them as necessary (i.e. crop to whatever video format I'm going for, white balance, sharpness, whatever) then export to JPG.

I don't have Premiere, I use Window Movie Maker. It doesn't handle the pictures-to-video process that well, so I use a program called Time Lapse Assembler on my Mac to produce a 24fps video. Into Movie Maker I go and add whatever I need.

It's not the most professional flow, but the results are pretty decent. Below is a quick example I did using this flow:

http://www.herbgraf.com/2013/12/06/christmas-tree-2013/

This is an example where I just used the output from Time Lapse Assembler:

http://www.herbgraf.com/2013/11/22/perseid-meteor-shower-2013/


----------

