Hi there.
I'm Scott Herter with HyperlapseHotography.com and today I'm going to show you how I use
LR time-lapse to process my time-lapse and hyperlapse videos.
Before we begin, I just want to take a quick moment and mention there are a few different
methods for using LR time-lapse.
In this video, I'm going to be covering the basics, which is how to process a simple time-lapse
or hyperlapse sequence.
What I mean by simple is that the video is pretty consistent and not changing from day
to night or vice versa.
Here's a couple of examples.
I categorize these as basic simply because the light doesn't change a lot and we don't
have to worry about making a lot of edits to get our final result.
In the next video, I'll also be talking about how to process and edit holy grail time-lapses,
which isn't much more difficult, it just involves an extra step that I think would
be perfect in another and a separate video.
So here's an example of a holy grail time-lapse.
As you can see, the colors change dramatically as the day goes tonight or the night goes
today.
The color change requires us to make a few extra edits, which I'll again discuss in
the next video.
So let's take a look at what we're going to be processing today.
We're just going to be focusing on the first six seconds of this video.
It starts off with a static shot of sole station, then we pan left with an anchor point on the
clock and then do a dolly shot into a flyer that we've superimposed on this window that
will take us to the next scene.
If you're new to time-lapse and hyperlapse photography, there's one thing I think is
worth mentioning.
If we look at this video, we have a shot of the sky in our shop.
But over here, as we pivot down to the window, the sky disappears.
This will have a very noticeable effect and be shown quite dramatically in LR time-lapse,
and I'll explain how to fix that in just a moment.
For now, let's open up LR time-lapse and find our footage.
So when you go into Lightroom time-lapse 4, this is kind of what it's going to look
like, and here is where you can find your files and the preview box, and here is where
we're going to be doing all of our heavy lifting.
So what we want to do, and this is the one gripe I do have about LR time-lapse 4, is
the folder structure is really annoying, and if you're not used to it, it can be a little
bit burdensome just to kind of figure out where everything is.
I place everything on an external hard drive.
So for hard drives, I have to go into volumes, and then I have the name of my hard drive.
If you put everything on your desktop, which I don't recommend doing, you're going to need
to go to Users, and then go to the name of your computer, and then go ahead to your desktop.
I don't recommend doing that, it just kind of slows down your computer, just as a FYI
to have everything on your desktop.
So I work off of an external, so we can go into Macintosh HD, and then we're going to
go, I'm sorry, to my personal hard drive, and then we can go find the file that way.
Okay, let's get back.
So let's go in here, and I want to find the copy that we made.
And if it's already giving you keyframes, I've already done this video.
What I want you to do is just go into Initialize, and it'll start everything all over.
So what you're looking at is, you're looking at your display.
This is kind of telling you what your shot is, you can actually go ahead and watch the
video if you want.
So you can just watch the video, you can see like, okay, here's some adjustments that I
need to make, you can see how bumpy it is.
And then it's going to tell you, you can export this in HD, 3K, 4K, if you have 6K abilities
or 8K abilities.
So mine, I can go up to 4K.
Okay, so here's what you're looking at, this is, this orange line represents what should
be steady exposure.
And then here you can see the purple line is our exposure, and so how it's changing over
time.
And what you want to do with this information is you can see this dip and it starts to get
really dark, and then I correct, and then it starts to kind of stable out.
So let me show you right here, what I mean by that.
Here it's going to start getting darker, darker, darker, darker, darker, darker, darker.
So we want to set up keyframes for this dark spot, because right here we kind of want everything
kind of levels out, and we can deal with that.
But from here to here, it's going to get really dramatically dark.
So what I want to do is I want to set a keyframe, because I know from here to here, the settings
are going to be the exact same, from here to here, I mean this section is pretty level.
So we can set keyframes in a couple ways, we can click keyframe wizard, and we can go
ahead and add a bunch or whatever.
Before we go into this, we'll click, there's different workflows.
Basic workflow is basic, it's the same thing, except we don't get a preview.
Visual workflow, we get a preview, we get this preview panel, which is new to Lighting Timelapse
4, it's a really great feature.
I recommend using this, if you have JPEGs, or if you shot with JPEGs, which I don't
recommend doing, you're going to want to use the basic workflow, because you won't even
be able to do this step.
Currently Lightroom Timelapse does not support previews on JPEGs, so that's why.
So we're in the visual workflow.
Now I like to put my keyframes manually.
So let me just kind of explain keyframes real quick, and what they are, and how we can make
them.
So to make them, all we need to do is just kind of click anywhere on any keyframe.
Click on it, and it turns blue, we got a keyframe.
To get rid of a keyframe, we can click on it.
And there's a little bit of a difference between these orange keyframes, and these blue keyframes.
The orange ones are ones that are made by the program.
And if we accidentally delete one, you don't need to worry, because all we need to do is
press the two button.
Two is the left keyframe, two, and if you forget about that, you can just go into keyframe,
and go ahead and create.
A left keyframe is to a right keyframe is three.
And these are ones that we are not going to edit.
The computer is just going to automatically adjust it for us.
I never really play with these keyframes.
I only mess around with the blue keyframes.
Those are the ones that we're going to edit, and that's how I'm going to make this decision
for the edits that we're going to do.
Which brings us to the next point.
How do we decide how many keyframes we need?
I'll kind of walk you through it.
There's no exact science, but I will kind of tell you how I decide how many keyframes
I will make, and when I need to make additional keyframes, like in this video.
So first things first, if I were to end this video, right here, and this would be the very
end of it, I would only make two keyframes.
I'd get rid of both of these, and I would just make one beginning and end keyframe.
The reason why is because this line is pretty straight.
This is our exposure line, and it's showing you that it's pretty evenly exposed, and then
it gets a little bit underexposed.
But I'm not too worried about this because it doesn't change back and forth.
If we started having a curve like this that changes back and forth, like a V, then we
might want to.
And now these little ones, I don't consider this a big enough problem.
What we care about is these dramatic, wow, that's a lot of light that we lost right there.
So think about this, if you're not familiar with histograms, this is evenly exposed, and
this is overexposed, and this is underexposed.
So it's getting pretty underexposed.
And then up in here, this is a safe area to be in, it's not a big deal.
In fact, I recommend shooting a little bit underexposed, that way you don't lose your
highlights.
So what am I going to do?
I have these two orange keyframes, and I kind of mentioned, I don't really like to mess
around with those.
I can go to after it and set a keyframe, or I could just eliminate both of these.
And then I want to go to the very peak here.
I want to go to the peak of this valley, and I want to go ahead and eliminate these keyframes,
and I'll just go ahead and make one.
And if you're having a trouble, if you're having a problem seeing these, you can actually
pop this out.
And I think you can make it bigger, right?
Maybe that's as big as it can go.
But so this is as big as it can go, and you can kind of see just a little bit better.
So that is how we're going to go about choosing our keyframes, and we're going to end up with
one, two, three, four keyframes.
And there's this other button here, the Holy Grail Wizard, but we're not going to worry
about that.
That's going to be in the next video where we're talking about how to adjust a data
night transition.
Although it's a little bit harder, and it involves an extra button.
So once we're done with that, we can go ahead and click save.
And if you ever kind of are stuck, or you're ever kind of forgetting how to use LR Timelapse
Pro, just remember, it works like this, it goes from left to right.
So we've got four buttons, keyframes, save, drag the Lightroom, open it up in Lightroom.
Then we edit in Lightroom, bring it back into Lightroom Timelapse, we reload auto transition,
save, preview our work, deflicker our work, save our work and export it.
So it's just really, really simple.
Once you get, once you do this a couple of times, you'll understand exactly what you
need to do.
All right, so let's go ahead and open this up in Lightroom.
And we want to import our section, you can go to import, and we can drag this in there.
However, when we do the drag, if I do this, you can you can just bring it right in.
Or you can also go into and into Lightroom and just find it that way.
This looks pretty easy, click import, and here we have the footage for the photos.
And you can see, what did we do?
We have this four star keyframe, and if we go down, we got this two and three, and we
got another two and three, and start to populate with some four star keyframes.
Remember what we're doing in here is we're setting those keyframes, we're telling you
which one's the four.
And a four is one that we're going to manually be adding two and threes are ones that the
computer is going to is or the program is going to manually or the program is going
to do automatically.
So we just want to focus on the four star keyframes.
So we'll go into here, and we're going to go ahead and click on, so I'm down here in
the filter section or in the dialogue, and I'm going to click on LRT four keyframes.
And it's going to show me all of the ones that just have four keyframes, which is perfect.
So then I'm going to go ahead and go into the develop module, and I'm going to process
my time lapse.
I'm going to process these photos exactly like I would any other photo and time lapse
or in in Lightroom.
So first things I'm going to do is enable my profile corrections and remove chromatic
aberrations.
And then I'm going to start processing.
And I kind of want this to be a little bit bluer.
I want it to be, I like a, I like a, what should I call it, a HDR kind of effect.
So I normally bring down my, my, my highlights quite a bit, maybe about 90 bump up my shadows,
80 or 90 whites, I bring them down, and I do something like this.
I like this, but again, you can do your own preference.
So I'm happy with that.
And once I'm done, another thing that you can do is you can also play with graduated
fillers, filters, fillers, sorry.
So you can play with graduated filters in Lightroom time lapse, and it'll do all of
that as well.
I'm not going to get into that.
I don't tend to use graduated filters, but that is an option for those that want to.
So here we're going to go ahead and shift click all of these.
And you may have noticed that when you install this program, you see this script up here.
You're going to go ahead and click on it, and we're going to click sync keyframes.
And now it's going to change all of these photos.
So you'll notice, if we go back here and kind of show you from here, this purple line is
our exposure.
Remember, it's pretty even keel.
But once we get to here, it drops down and you can see that here.
Now you can see that.
Whoa, this is super dark.
It's the same settings and it's really dark.
This looks really good.
This does not.
Perfect.
Now I can go ahead and I can adjust the exposure until it looks good.
And I'm pretty, I think that's good.
I don't want it to be too high.
And I can go look at the histogram and I can go here and see like, okay, this is brighter
and this is a little bit darker.
And that's good because it should be a little bit darker.
We want it to be a little bit darker.
I can even bump up the shadows a little bit if I want to, I'm not going to.
And now that I'm done with this and I'm happy with these settings, I can go ahead and shift
click and I can sync these two keyframes.
And this should also look good.
Perfect.
So I'm happy.
I'm done.
It didn't take too long.
I've now processed my time lapse or my hyperlapse in this case.
What we want to do now is we want to go into the library mode and save our work.
So we can go into metadata.
This is what we're editing so far and we're going to click save metadata to files.
You could also use the shortcut on your computer.
If you don't know the shortcut, you can just click metadata and here it is.
For a Mac, it is command S. Once we've done that, we're going to go into Lightroom Timelapse.
We're going to click this row.
We're now working on this row because we've just been in Lightroom.
You can also do this in page.
We can go to reload and we will see our adjustments.
I underexposed it here and I kept that here.
Then I brought it up to kind of equalize this change here.
And then I kept it up here because it was a little bit too dark.
Now we go ahead and click Auto Transition and we see it is smoothing out this line.
We've got this yellow line and this is going to be what it's trying to fix.
It's trying to make it smooth.
It's trying to make it even keel with this section and it's going to hopefully eliminate
all of the problems.
Now we click save and the next step, we're just going to move on down here and this is
the visual preview section.
So we can actually preview our work before we turn it into a video.
I'm going to click on it and it's going to actually apply all of the edits and this is
really cool.
This is a new feature with Lightroom Timelapse 4.
You couldn't do this before.
You used to have to render the video, see if you liked it and then make changes.
But we don't have to do that.
So the computer is going to process each of these photos and show you what the video looks
like.
So we're going to take a break and when it's done, we'll come back and we'll see if we're
happy with the video or if we need to run this visual deflicker program and we'll talk
about that in just a moment.
Okay and we are back and so now the visual preview is completely done.
You can see this purple line is basically what it's done and it's tried to adjust it
to make it as close to this yellow line as possible and let's go ahead and preview it.
We see a little bit of darkening but overall this looks pretty good.
Now we do want to use this visual deflicker because right around here you can kind of
see it gets dark.
So we can go ahead and change that.
So we'll click visual deflicker and it'll create this green line and the green line
is really cool.
What it's going to do is it's going to smooth everything and make it and force everything
to fit inside of it and it's going to magically calculate everything out so that way everything
smoothens out in this green line.
Now the temptation is to go ahead and crank this up so it's just one big straight line.
However that doesn't quite work so well.
What you want to try to do instead is try to keep it along this line because if things
are passing by then you want this variation in light.
This variation in light will help kind of, I mean it's realistic.
This is what happens when you're doing a time lapse.
Sometimes clouds cover the sky.
Sometimes buses move in front of things and things should get darker.
That's just what happens.
So don't resist the temptation to just crank it up to as high as you can.
You don't need to and in fact it's not going to look as good.
So what you want to do is try to keep it along the line.
So I think that looks pretty good, yeah right there.
This will be smoothened out really well and this section isn't too dramatic.
So we'll click apply then we'll click save and the computer's going to go ahead and check
it out one more time.
It's going to go ahead and make all of these previews and so we'll take a look at that
as soon as it's done.
And we are back and now we can see this green line, everything's pretty much in it.
It looks really good.
Let's go ahead and preview the results and make sure we're happy.
So I think that looks absolutely great.
If you wanted to you could go ahead and continue to smooth out the flicker until you are happy.
I'm happy.
I'm going to go ahead and click save and I'm going to go into Lightroom and now what we
need to do is we need to see all of these keyframes.
So we're going to go ahead and adjust it to the full sequence.
Command A will select all or you could just go ahead and shift click if you wanted to.
Shift click all and now we need to read the metadata, I'm sorry.
So we'll click read metadata from files and it's going to adjust all of these photos.
And what we really just need to do is we need to just wait until we can see that this is
completely done.
And once that's done, we can export our video.
We don't have to wait until the computer reads all of this as long as this part up here is
done.
So as soon as this is done, I'll show you how to do that.
So now that's done.
So we can go ahead as long as all of these photos are selected, we can go ahead and click
export.
And it's going to bring up this dialog.
We want to go into the LR time-lapse sequences and so we'll click LR time-lapse and we have
four options by default.
And you can do 16-bit tips.
These are huge files, they will be 100 megabytes or bigger.
Again eight-bit tips, these are super high-res profile photos, they'll be again 50 megabytes
or the original.
This is what I always do, I always go into the original.
And the first thing that we need to do is we need to go ahead and set up where everything's
going to be.
So we're going to go into the time-lapse photography, we'll go into our Wednesday projects, number
24 and we will click LR copy.
And all you need to do, it doesn't matter if your XMP files are up here, you just need
to find the first photo you can grab.
Then we'll go ahead and select where we want this to go.
And I will put demo video.
And then we'll click OK.
And then we can go into the LRT sequence and we can name this, we can name our sequence,
so non-demo, wait this is actually soul station, demo.
And so we can go ahead and click export as soon as we're ready.
And now it will take a while for the computer to do all this.
So again, we're going to take a break while it's going on and we'll be right back when
it's done exporting the 144 photos.
All right, so we're back and we've got this dialogue saying hey, it can't finish, what
we're going to do now is we're going to go into LRT time-lapse and here is our settings.
Now let me run you through all the different things real quick.
Here's where we're running the video from and we're again, we're going to put it, we've
already set that up.
Next is the MP4 ProRes and this experimental footage.
You can do MP4, you're going to get a consumer quality video, it's not going to be as great
as it could be.
But what I recommend is just leaving it at ProRes.
Then we have these output size.
What we can do is we can go ahead and change the output size to anything.
I always go with source resolution, I like that.
And I also don't like to force the output to 60 by 9 because when we go ahead and stabilize
the footage, we're going to end up losing some of our footage.
So I just kind of like to leave it at full size.
So I recommend you doing that too.
We can set our frame rates and we can set our quality unless we want something to be
ultra high quality, we can do this but we're going to get a 4x4 video.
And not all computers, not all things can play that.
So I just go to very high and 422 as a typical ProRes.
And then we have these post processing things.
Things are actually really great add-ons.
We have these LRT motion plus motion blur.
This is great.
If we have a stationary time lapse, meaning where the scene is not changing, where we're
not moving the tripod or we're not doing any of that, this is a great effect.
The problem is we are going to be moving the camera.
So we do not want this.
But again, real quick, if we have things moving through our scene, we have these clouds or
we do have flicker.
We can go ahead and play with these settings and choose one and see what gets this the
best result.
These will get rid of flicker as well.
We don't have that luxury in a hyperlapse.
And then you have the option for copyright overlay.
And lastly, we have this delete intermediate secrets after rendering.
I normally do that.
However, if we're going to be playing around with the motion blur, I recommend not deleting
the intermediate sequences.
That way you can make them really quick.
Once you've exported all of the photos, this process doesn't take very much time.
So let's go ahead and let's click.
Check this and we will not delete the intermediate sequence and we'll go ahead and click render.
And you'll see this dialogue down here and it's going to go really, really quickly.
We've already done all the hard parts and we have it's got 144 frames to do.
It'll let us know when it's done and so we'll be right back when it's done to watch the
final video.
Okay, so then when we're done with the video, we can go into our demo file and we see we
got this.
We have our source files as well, which we could render out another video very quickly.
You can change the settings real quick.
Or we could also go ahead and watch the video.
Now this is 1.6 gigabytes.
So it's pretty large.
It's going to be really difficult to see the whole thing unless we bring it into another
project.
I can try it real quick, but I don't think it's going to play so well.
Oh, this is good.
So it's a little bit slower than it would be normally, but that is the video and I'm
very happy with the output.
Now we would just need to go ahead and stabilize it and remove this, which you'll learn in
the other videos.
So that's about it.
Now there's one more trick I do want to show you.
If you are on the fence about this program or you kind of want to play with it a few
times before you decide to buy it, I will show you a little trick that you can do in
After Effects.
So remember, we've already tweaked this.
This is already ready to go.
We can import this file before we export it using Lightroom Timelapse into After Effects.
And After Effects will allow us to compile it as a timelapse video.
Just like Lightroom.
I'm at Lightroom Timelapse.
So let's take a look at how that works.
We can go into After Effects, we can go ahead and go File, Import, and we will go ahead
and search for that file.
And we're going to go into our devices, My Passport, yada, yada, yada.
Okay, so we're going to go into here and real quick we're going to go ahead and go by date
quantified and we're going to get the first photo of the sequence.
And it's going to say, Import as Camera Raw Sequence, which is exactly what we want.
So we'll click OK.
That's fine.
Okay.
And now we have a video.
We have a normal video.
And it's perfect.
It's a timelapse.
And now we can edit this or we can stabilize this.
Now the one thing I will warn you about this is while you can do this for free, you still
got all of the edits, which is super awesome.
When you are trying to stabilize this, man, it is going to take you 10 to 15 times longer.
For some reason, if you just do it as a Camera Raw Sequence, it is just so much more data.
It's about a four gigabyte file instead of a one gigabyte file.
So it's going to take four times the computing power, it's going to take a lot more work.
You can do this.
And this is kind of a way a workaround if you're trying to save up to buy Lightroom Timelapse
or if you're just kind of like, oh my God, I don't want to buy all these programs.
This is something that you can do.
Again, I think your time is worth money.
And after trying to do big projects like minute long projects and two minute long projects
like this, it'll take hours and hours and hours to change a 15 second clip.
When I started to render them out as videos in Lightroom Timelapse, it would take me 10,
15 minutes to do a 10 to 15 second clip.
So that's just something to think about.
If you can't do this, this is available to you if you wanted to.
That's it for this video.
If you have any feedback on things that maybe I missed or you want me to cover again, please
let me know.
I want to make these videos the best they can, as easy as they can, and as clear as they
can.
I really want to help you figure out how to make your vision come true.
So let me know at Scott at hyperlapsephotography.com, and I'll see you in the next video.
