I have recently become somewhat obsessed with time lapse images, and want to start making my own. I've got the gear required for it...but I'm unsure about software. I attempted to take a sequence last night of my chanukah candles burning...I have 2000 6MP JPEGs, and iMovie thinks it's going to take 7 hours to assemble them into a video. There has to be a faster way, right?
What software/workflow should I be looking into? I've got a Mac and a Linux machine, each of which have a decently fast CPU and 8GB of RAM. I already have Photoshop CS5 and the various software that comes with Snow Leopard, but I'm not opposed to spending a bit of money if I need to in order to get the right thing. I'm not looking to make super hi-res videos, but it would be nice if I can make long movies.
Totally free and quite powerful. The interface is spartan, and there's a short-but-steep learning curve. Once you figure it out, you can add an entire directory of files (jpg, tiff, tga, etc.) and start to render a movie in about a minute. (Actual move encoding can obviously take much longer.)
You'll also need/want to download http://sourceforge.net/projects/x264vfw/
This will give you x264 encoding, one of the better video compression schemes around.
Both projects are open source and are free of add ware, viruses, and other junk.
I don't recall exactly, but I think it was somewhere around 1 frame per second running on a 2GHz laptop. Any halfway modern desktop CPU will churn out many frames per second. Multiple cores help too.The incoming files were 8MP jpegs. The program did two x/2 size reductions, then some brightness/contrast tweaking, then some sharpening before adding the resultant frame to the film. (Adding filters and effects is VERY easy, and you can stack, order, disable/enable reach filter as needed.)
The only tricky part is that all the image files must be sequentially numbered. If shooting RAW, set your batch processor to start a new file name sequence like "File0001.xxx"
See also https://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/1175843/0#11208928
I have possibly the worst workflow ever when it comes to time lapses. I import all into Lightroom where I make some color adjustments and then sync them all up. Then import them all into windows movie maker to just get it into a video format... Then it's into Sony Vegas for the final tweaking.
I'll definitely be checking out your resources
This is a time lapse I did with that workflow,
Definitely not my best work, I actually play on the team so I set my camera up long before the game and just prayed it worked (hence some of the jumps in there)
It's super-easy, just use the "open image sequence" command and point to a folder with sequentially-numbered files. Save as a .mov and you're done, OR import into movie editing software of your choice.
One of my short timelapse videos, interlaced with stills, can be seen here.
