Application for Time Lapse Photography

[Thlayle]

Hello,

I am looking for input on a good choice for an application for processing time lapse series of photos. Note I am not necessarily looking for the best choice. I do have a budget to consider.

Right now, I am using Aperture and it works fairly well though I am not greatly impressed with it. I also have Lightroom and Photoshop to work with but I am new to both of them and have not learned yet if they have a good time lapse assembly feature.

I am open to learning just about any new program. And...I am working from the Apple/Mac platform.

Thanks,

Randy

[Manfred M]

Randy - I'm not sure what you are after. Time lapse is usually done in camera and then assembled using a non-linear video editor. I've used both Apple Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere Pro. I would look at iMovie to see if that would work for you.

[Thlayle]

Thanks, Manfred. Maybe you could clarify for me. What I am so far doing is not necessarily real time lapse photography. I would be interested in hearing about what you are referring to that goes on "in camera."

I am collecting a large number of still images, using an intervalometer and then processing them to an mv4 output. The initial image quality on each frame is good, though I restrict myself to just large size JPEGs. At this point, I am not looking at serious, high quality time lapse per se but simple constructions requiring less bandwidth and that can be shared on You Tube & the like.

I might eventually get more serious about this and want to look at Final Cut Pro.

iMovie -- not so good. I have looked at it.

Thanks,

-rb

[Manfred M]

I've just confirmed that Photoshop CC has the capability to do what you want. I believe CS6 also had this capability

You need to open a video timeline and add the images to it, one behind the other. You then have to select a framerate that you want the clip to play back at, the codec you want to use (I suggest H.264 would be a good one to try) and then render it out. I would suggest 24 fps to start (this is the framerate that feature films use).

A video is really a series of single shots played back at a given framerate.

Here's a screeenshot of what you are looking for in Photoshop. I've used a video clip rather than individual frames, but the way things work is the same. I would also suggest that you resize your images to a typical video size like 1920 x 1280 or 1080 x 720 before putting them into the timeline.

[Thlayle]

Thanks so much! I am using Photoshop CC, just beginning to delve into it. Adding time lapse rendering to the list of things to try soon.

-rb