More Time Lapse Fun

I have been messing around with time lapses for a while as regular readers will know.  One of the things that I had been thinking about was getting a panning effect in a time lapse.  I was chatting with Ken Sklute at ISAP and he told me that, rather than bothering with expensive motorized panning heads, it was simpler to use the full image size that a DSLR offers and let the video software undertake the panning for you by cropping in on the shots.

I am not a big video guy and have Pinnacle Studio as my package.  It is fine for the basic stuff but doesn’t have the most impressive features.  When I goggled this topic, I came up with After Effects techniques for doing what I wanted.  I tried the free trial but struggle to come to terms with what was required, despite the detailed tutorial.  Guess that says something about me as a self teaching student.

Then I got lucky,  My friend Jo Hunter over at futurshox posted some video from Oshkosh of time lapses doing exactly what I wanted.  I dropped her a message and she came straight back with the solution.  The program is called LRTimelapse and it is a standalone program that makes Lightroom develop settings that you can then combine with a video output setting to make the final product.  It is developed by a guy called Gunther Wegner and you can find the whole thing at his website.  It is donationware and I have made one because it works and has solved a problem that had been troubling me for a while.

I need to get better at the effect but for the time being, here is a sample of the effect.  For comparison, first I have the original time lapse and second I have the panning version.  No change in the content but certainly a more interesting thing to watch I think.

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