Lightroom 3: Bring on the time-lapse videos

Adobe Systems released the first Lightroom 3.0 beta only last week, but already people are adapting the software for their own ends. In Sean McCormack's case, time-lapse video.

Time-lapse photography, for those unfamiliar with it, compresses a sequence of still images into a movie that appears to speed up the passage of time. It's how nature documentaries get those clouds scudding over the mountains and the sun racing across the sky.

Most of us use just a small fraction of what our software can do, but McCormack is one of those people at the other end of the spectrum who figures out how to push software well beyond the built-in feature set. In Lightroom's case he took advantage of its ability to export a sequence of shots as a video, a feature designed to let photographers create easily shared slideshows.

Adobe's new Lightroom 3 beta lets people present a slideshow with frame intervals as short as a tenth of a second. But on the advice of Lightroom programmer Andy Rahm McCormack dug into the text of the software's existing template files, called presets, and adapted them to produce a custom file with a 24-frame per second rate used in some video. Another sets it for high-definition 720p output.

Click the image below to see one time-lapse video McCormack created.

I just love this kind of noodling around to produce unexpected results, and McCormack is just the person for it. He's a sound engineer by trade, but he's also a semi-professional photographer, author of "Photoshop Lightroom 2 Made Easy," moderator of Adobe Systems' Lightroom help forum, author of Lightroom Blog, and contributor to Lightroom News. I listen carefully to his Lightroom utterances.

Compact cameras and more recently SLRs have blurred the boundaries between the once-separate domains of still photography and video, but software is amplifying the changes. For example, the Timelapser app for the iPhone lets you create time-lapse movies. In my opinion, with digital cameras and increasingly powerful computers, photography and videography are entering a golden age of experimentation.

There are downsides: a breakneck pace of change can make it hard to keep up with all the latest things and means your camera is rapidly out of date. And digital manipulation can lead to photos that are anything from unpleasantly overprocessed to an outright lie. But on balance, I see more benefits than drawbacks.

Here's where I'm not so happy when it comes to the time-lapse situation in particular, though. In the digital era, it's pretty easy to build intervalometer abilities into a camera so it will periodically and automatically take a photo at some specified interval. That's what you need to make time-lapse video.

Of course, my Canon SLR needs an expensive accessory to do it. Harrumph. Canon, are you listening?

The Lightroom 3 beta will look familiar to current users, but there are changes under the hood. In addition, Lightroom catalogs can be synchronized with Flickr.

(Credit: Adobe Systems)

[bildan2]

I love time lapse - 40 years ago I had a simple intervalometer that tripped the single frame function on my Bolex 16mm film movie camera. AFAIK, a single frame mode was standard on all 16mm cameras. Now, I have an expensive digital camcorder which can't do it.

So now you need a STILL camera and special software to do time lapse. Why the heck isn't a time lapse mode standard on all camcorders? There's no technical reason why not.

[Shankland]

In fairness, there is a reason, if not much of a technical reason: adding intervalometer support involves just that much more development and testing, and judging by Canon's firmware issues with the 5D Mark II and 7D, it's working flat out to get the cameras shipped with essential functions. The company is under a lot of financial pressure, too, and Nikon is resurgent in SLRs at least. So they do have some excuses. I still really would like it built in, though, and some competing cameras have it.

[indoorsman]

Picasa already has a time lapse feature built in. My Nikon D300 has a built-in intervalometer as well. Also, it's super easy in Quicktime to create a video from a folder that has all your time lapse pics in it.

[Shankland]

I didn't know about Picasa--thanks for the tip! Can it do that with music, too?

To be clear, with QuickTime, you need QuickTime Pro, which costs all of $30, but most folks don't mess with it.

[lazycat202]

i wouldn't mess with QuickTime; unless my kids' apps ask for it. Most of learning videos (Rabbit Learner, JumpStart) requires QuickTime to be installed.

[indoorsman]

Here's a time lapse I made w/ my Nikon D300, using Picasa to merge the pictures together.

http://www.vimeo.com/2820763

[The_JBJ]

This is really awesome. I'm going to go outside right now and try for some night scene with stars time-lapse. On a side note, Stephen, I have a Canon 40D and I use the Opteka Timer Remote Control for Canon cameras. You can find it here:
http://www.amazon.com/Opteka-Remote-Control-Digital-Cameras/dp/B0012H0LQI/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1256955732&sr=8-2

It costs about 60 Bucks, but that's half of Canon's price. It also works really well and the night light is brighter than the Canon version. The only negative is that it doesn't have Canon's thumb wheel or an off switch. Still, I've been using it for a year and I'm really impressed.

[krosafcheg]

"Most of use just " meant to possibly be "Most of us use just"?

Steve, have you tried using the software that came with the Canon camera? Depending on what SLR you use you can use EOSUtility to control the camera and take images at regular intervals that way.

[Shankland]

Thanks for the catch. I'm not a big fan of tethered shooting for my own photography--I have enough trouble lugging around the camera and lenses. But that's a good tip.

[PhilMi]

Time Lapse is cool, but why make it 24fps when you could video record it - the same frame rate as Nikon's DSLR frame rate.

[Shankland]

Time-lapse and video are not the same thing. Video is recorded and played back at the same rate, so watching it looks like reality (unless you're shooting at a high frame rate like 60fps, in which case playing back at 30fps makes for slow-motion video). In time-lapse video, the individual shots are taken much farther apart--say, a few seconds or minutes, so playing it back looks like time has been sped up.

Also, Canon's 7D and 1D Mark IV can shoot at 24fps (actually 23.976) and the 5D Mark II will be able to with a firmware update due next year.